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COPYRIGHT DEPOSHi 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

A Series of Papers Setting Forth the Program, 

Achievements, Present Status, and Probable 

Future of the American College 



With Introduction by 

WILLIAM H. CRAWFORD 

President Allegheny College 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1915 






,^^ 



COPTEIGHT, 1915, 
BY 

HENKY HOLT AND COMPANY 
Published December, 1915 



THE OUINN \ BOOEN CO. PKCSS 
RAMWAr, N. J. 



if^N -6 1916 

©CI.A418341 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

Introduction v 

I. The Aim and Scope of the New England 

College 3 

President William H. P. Faunce, Brown 
University. 

II. The Place of the Languages and Literatures 

IN THE College Curriculum .... 21 
Professor Pcml Shorey, University of 
Chicago. 

III. The Place of the Newer Humanities in the 

College Curriculum 41 

Dean Charles H. Haskins, Harvard 
University. 

IV. The Place op the Physical and Natural 

Sciences in the College Curriculum . . 59 
Professor Edwin O. Conklin, Princeton 
University. 

V. The College as a Preparation for Profes- 
sional Study 77 

President Bush Bhees, University of 
Rochester. 

VI. The College as a Preparation for Practical 

Affairs 95 

President Charles F. Thwing, Western 
Reserve University. 

VII. The Present Status and Probable Future of 

THE College in the East 105 

President John H. Finley, University 
State of New York. 
iii 



iv CONTENTS 

CHAPTEa PAGE 

VIII. The Present Status and Probable Future of 

THE COIXEGE IN THE SoUTH 121 

President William P. Few, Trinity College. 

IX. The Present Status and Probable Future of 

THE College in the West 131 

President William F. Slocum, Colorado 
College. 

X. The Function of the College as Distinct 
From the High School, the Professional 
School, and the University .... 147 
President Alexander Meiklejohn, Amherst 
College. 

XI. The American College in the Life of the 

American People 171 

Commissioner Philander P. Claxton, Bu- 
reau of Education, Washington. 



INTRODUCTION 

The chapters included in this volume comprise 
the papers read at a Conference on the American 
College held on the occasion of the celebration of 
the One Hundredth Anniversary of the founding 
of Allegheny College. They were all specially pre- 
pared for this particular event. In fact, the en- 
tire programme of the conference was made out 
before anyone was asked to read a paper. Careful 
attention was given to selecting for a particular 
topic the man who could speak with authority on 
that topic. The book, therefore, is a new book, 
and presents the freshest and most comprehensive 
thought on the American college. 

In making up the list of subjects not much 
attention was given to the early history of the 
American college or to the peculiar conditions 
which favored its early development. Much atten- 
tion, however, was given to the programme of the 
college, its curriculum, its present status in va- 
rious parts of the country, and its probable future. 
In short, it was aimed to include in the volume the 
essential things pertaining to the American college 
as a present-day institution and as an institution 
of promise for the future educational development 



vi INTRODUCTION 

of America. Before finally deciding upon the 
topics to be discussed the advice of a goodly 
number of the foremost educators of the country 
was carefully sought and freely given. Further- 
more, each one of the scholarly men invited to 
prepare a paper was asked to speak out his mind 
freely, and assured that what was wanted in the 
conference was a free, frank, and open expression 
of the thought of educational leaders touching the 
college as an institution included in the educational 
regime of our country. 

The conference had been fairly well advertised 
beforehand in the public press. The unique char- 
acter of the programme attracted no little atten- 
tion. It was no surprise, therefore, that nearly 
one hundred colleges were represented at the open- 
ing session, nor was it a surprise that the spacious 
Ford Memorial Chapel was more than crowded to 
its capacity at the closing session. Not the audi- 
ences only but the interest increased from the 
beginning to the end. It was a matter of com- 
ment at the close of the first session that a con- 
ference of an unusually high order was on. The 
speakers were at their best, and some of them 
seemed to be better than their best. While there 
were some striking differences of opinion as to what 
the college ought to be, there was a fine spirit of 
toleration throughout and much more substantial 
agreement as to fundamentals than was antici- 



INTRODUCTION vii 

pated. One speaker who made a strong plea for 
the place of the physical and the natural sciences 
in the college curriculum showed his catholic spirit 
in saying: " No education is liberal which does not 
introduce one to the world's best thought and life. 
A purely classical education and a purely scientific 
one are equally illiberal. A liberal education is 
broad, disciplinary, and useful; it educates head, 
heart, and hand ; it must include literature, science, 
and the humanities; it must fit for contact with 
the world along many lines ; it must help one to find 
himself and to choose his work ; it must prepare 
for the largest usefulness and enjoyment." An- 
other speaker whose responsibility was to plead for 
the humanities said : " The great defect with Amer- 
ican college education is that it does not set the 
mass of students intellectually on fire. Our col- 
leges are only in an imperfect degree intellec- 
tual institutions. The real rivalry is not between 
classics and sociology, between history and chemis- 
try, but a struggle with ignorance, materialism, 
and superficiality for the development of the in- 
tellectual life. . . . Some of us would prefer to 
see students roused by literature, others by science, 
others by economics, but the main thing is that 
they be roused." 

The European war was touched upon by sev- 
eral of the speakers. President Rhees referred to 
the so-called " biological defense " of the war. 



viii INTRODUCTION 

" The tragedy of that argument," said he, " is its 
false analogy, its blindness to what fitness and 
progress have come to mean in the unfolding of hu- 
man history." Professor Conklin seized the op- 
portunity to make stronger his case by saying: 
" One of the slight compensations for the world 
war which is now raging is that we are likely to 
hear less in the future of that much abused word 
' culture.' For half a century it has been a word 
to conjure with, especially in academic circles, but 
it has never had any constant meaning except that 
of self-conscious and rather intolerant superiority. 
As a result every cult or social group or institution 
or nation has defined the word so as to include 
itself and to exclude the rest of the world." Dean 
Haskins added to the strength of his plea for the 
newer humanities by the suggestive statement: 
" The present European war has shown, by im- 
pressive and even tragic examples, that the days 
of our national isolation are over and that we can 
no longer refrain from following closely those 
movements of world politics to which the United 
States has been so long indiff'erent." 

If there was doubt in the minds of any who 
attended the conference as to the present status 
and probable future of the college in the West, the 
doubt vanished before the striking and almost 
colossal array of facts presented in the reports 
from seven typical colleges by President Slocum. 



INTRODUCTION ix 

His argument would have been even stronger if the 
limits of his paper had permitted him to mention 
a dozen other institutions within the same area, 
all of which are included in the list of one hundred 
and eighteen institutions recommended to the 
Kultus Ministerium of Prussia by the Association 
of American Universities, — such institutions as 
Ohio Wesleyan, Kenyon, Lawrence, Lake Forest, 
Wabash, DePauw, Cornell, and Drake. 

Perhaps the most striking difference of opinion 
was shown in the description of the original pur- 
pose of the American college. The difference 
centered about the words " cultural " and " voca- 
tional." Even here there seemed to be a disposition 
to see the other's point of view. A gentleman 
whose judgment is to be respected described the 
positions of two of the speakers on this wise : " Dr. 

A. fears that any man who uses the term ' voca- 
tion ' has surrendered to utilitarianism, while Dr. 

B. fears that any man who uses the term ' culture ' 
apart from purpose may be working in a vacuum." 

One of the noticeable and significant things 
about the conference was the strength and virility 
of the utterances. There was no attempt to cover 
up. On the contrary there was a straightforward 
and open facing of the facts, with an appeal almost 
prophetic for the things which make for life and 
character. Here is a sample from the paper of 
President Meiklejohn: "So far as we can bring 



X INTRODUCTION 

it about the young people of our generation shall 
know themselves, shall know their fellows, shall 
think their way into the common life of their 
people, and by their thought shall illumine and 
direct it. If we are not pledged to that, then we 
have deserted the old standard; we are apostates 
from the faith. . , . We pledge ourselves to a 
study of the universal things in human life, the 
things that make us men as well as ministers and 
tradesmen. We pledge ourselves forever to a 
study of human living in order that living may 
be better done. We have not yet forgotten that 
fundamentally the proper study of mankind is 
Man." A fitting paragraph to put alongside this 
is from the closing part of President Finley's 
paper : " If this multiple college is to be merely or 
chiefly a place of discipline, then its tasks might 
better be given over to the high schools, to the 
gymnasia. If it is to be a place of special prepa- 
ration for life, then it would better give way to 
the professional, the technical school, the univer- 
sity. If it is to be a place merely through which 
to attain, in an agreeable way, social position and 
conventional culture, to take part in contests of 
bodily strength and skill, or to enjoy only the com- 
panionships and friendships of living (that is, if it 
is to be a great college, country or city, club), it 
is perhaps hardly worth preserving as an American 
institution. But if it is to be for the many (what 



INTRODUCTION xi 

it has been, thank God, for the few), if it is to be 
for all the fit, a place of understanding, of rebirth, 
of entering the race mind, then is the college 
which I see in prospect the most precious of all our 
educational possessions." 

The above quotations are included in this intro- 
duction with a twofold purpose : First, to indicate 
the general scope and spirit of the papers pre- 
sented; and, second, to whet the appetite of the 
reader for what follows. If the atmosphere which 
pervaded the conference shall pervade, even in 
some small measure, the printed page, it is con- 
fidently believed that this volume will be regarded 
as a real and valuable contribution to the literature 
of the American college. 

William H. Crawfokd. 
Meadville, Pennsylvania. 
August 12, 1915. 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 



THE AIM AND SCOPE OF THE 
NEW ENGLAND COLLEGE 

PRESIDENT WILLIAM H. P. FAUNCE 

The story of the New England college is a story 
of heroism and loyalty unsurpassed in American 
life. It has an epic quality which lifts it far 
above any bare chronicle of events. It sings not 
of arms and the hero, but of heroes who, unarmed 
and unsupported, devoted their lives to the good 
fight for the education of the generation to come. 
It is part of the story of Plymouth Rock and 
Bunker Hill. To-day colleges flourish in all our 
commonwealths, buildings and endowments multi- 
ply. But on anniversary occasions it is good for 
us to remember that we of the present generation 
are in a land full of wells which we digged not, 
vineyards and olive trees which we planted not. 

The original aim of the New England college is 
stated in a tablet on the West Gate of Harvard 
University : " After God had carried us safe to 
New England and we had builded our houses, pro- 
vided necessaries for our livelihood, reared con- 
venient places for God's worship, and settled the 
civil government, one of the next things we longed 

3 



4 WILLIAM H. P. FAUNCE 

for and looked after was to advance learning and 
perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an 
illiterate ministry to the churches, when our pres- 
ent ministers shall lie in the dust." In that sen- 
tence we have the historic order of the Puritan 
life: first, the building of houses to shelter the 
newcomers from the inclement sky; then the pro- 
curing of necessary food; then the provision for 
common worship ; then the election of magistrates 
to execute the laws. Next came education, as a 
thing not only " longed for," but " looked after " 
in very practical fashion. And the reason why 
those men desired learning was not for its con- 
solations and delights, not because of the satis- 
faction it might bring to intellectual curiosity, but 
because of its concrete value in equipping the new 
colony through all the future with competent re- 
ligious teachers and guides. The college was thus 
bom of the Christian faith, intended to serve for 
the maintenance of that faith, and its aim was 
not abstract culture, or scientific research, or the 
increase of human knowledge, but the equipment 
of men for their life work. 

On the records of the ancient church in Provi- 
dence, in whose meeting-house Brown University 
holds its annual commencements, is this suggestive 
entry of 1774 : " Voted, to build a meeting-house 
for the public worship of Almighty God, and also 
to hold Commencement in." Again the same pur- 



THE NEW ENGLAND COLLEGE 5 

pose appears in the linking of education and re- 
ligion. The delight in learning for its own sake, 
which marked the Renaissance in Europe, played 
small part in our colonial history. The solving 
of physical or metaphysical problems, which was 
the goal of the schoolmen, was not the aim of our 
fathers. To them learning was not, in Bacon's 
phrase, " a terrace for a wandering and variable 
mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect " ; 
it was equipment for a religious vocation, it was 
the development of men fitted for leadership in 
times of stress and danger. The General Assembly 
of Connecticut in 1753 declared " that one prin- 
cipal and proposed end in erecting the college was 
to supply the churches in this country with a 
learned, pious, and orthodox ministry." 

The founding of the University of Pennsyl- 
vania, under the influence of Benjamin Franklin, 
had, of course, a very different motive. The later 
establishment of the University of Virginia re- 
flected the ideals of Thomas Jefferson, which were 
hardly those of the founders of the Puritan the- 
ocracy. But in New England all the earlier col- 
leges were the offspring of religious faith. The 
motto of Harvard, — Christo et ecclesice, — and of 
Yale, — Lux ac Veritas, — and of Brown, — In Deo 
speramus, — all affinn the religious motive behind 
the New England enterprise. 

Our oldest colleges were thus both religious in 



6 WILLIAM H. P. FAUNCE 

motive and vocational in aim. But the vocation 
for which they prepared men was one of the broad- 
est and most fundamental character. The Puritan 
preacher was conceived to be an authority on the 
deepest problems of this world and that which is 
to come. He was the chief expounder of a long 
sacred history, embodied in a varied literature, and 
of an elaborate religious philosophy buttressed by 
that literature. He was also the chief orator on all 
public occasions, he was social arbiter, political 
adviser, leader of civic life, and in Massachusetts 
and Connecticut he was an officer of the state. 
Such a man must have no mere technical training. 
He must be made to grapple with philosophical 
problems, be versed in the languages in which such 
problems were discussed, and must possess such 
power of reasoning, of judgment, of expression, 
as should equip him for his broad and varied task. 
Mere "bread-and-butter studies" were no 
preparation for such a life. Mere technical train- 
ing, narrow in horizon and illiberal in spirit, was 
beside the mark. The founders of our early col- 
leges certainly did not conceive of them as " divin- 
ity schools," in which men, already educated, 
might acquire the technique of a profession. 
Probably seventy-five per cent, of the studies 
pursued in those colleges had no direct bearing on 
the clerical calling — just as seventy-five per cent, 
of the studies pursued at West Point to-day have 



THE NEW ENGLAND COLLEGE 7 

no exclusive bearing on the soldier's profession. 
But the founders of our New England colleges, 
while broad In their horizon, were definite In their 
aim. To them a " vocation " was something divine, 
and to prepare men for the high calling — the 
highest on earth they conceived it to be — was a 
noble and heroic enterprise. If the word " voca- 
tional " has In our day acquired a narrower mean- 
ing, it is time to rescue it from degradation. Vo- 
cational training for the broadest and finest of 
human vocations — such was the ideal of the early 
New England college. 

But such training, it was held from the very be- 
ginning, might be useful for many other men 
whose task was of broad or general character. 
Thus the charter of Yale speaks of " fitting youth 
for public employment both in church and civil 
state." It was early held that what was good for 
the minister was good also for the prospective 
lawyer or teacher or even physician. Gradually 
the constituency of the college widened, and then 
the curriculum widened necessarily to meet the 
needs of the new constituency. Gradually there 
grew up the ideal of general culture, apart from 
any vocational aim, as the true end and purpose of 
the college. Latin, no longer essential to success 
in life, was retained in the nineteenth century on 
grounds of disciplinary and cultural value. Greek, 
no longer necessary for professional equipment, 



8 WILLIAM H. P. FAUNCE 

was retained for its linguistic and literary value; 
while mathematics, almost ignored at first, acquired 
large place as a training in exactness and in rea- 
soning power, which could not fail to deepen and 
strengthen the mind. Gradually thus the voca- 
tional aim was merged in the disciplinary aim, 
and that " culture " which to the first founders 
was only a by-product of comprehensive prepara- 
tion for life was exalted as the be-all and end-all 
of the college course. At the same time the theo- 
logical element in the old curriculum was abbrevi- 
ated, and more of the humanities, — history and 
" polite literature," — was introduced. Thus it 
came about that for the last hundred years the 
New England college has been the citadel, not of a 
definite training, but of a humane culture which 
has exalted " useless studies " and sought simply 
to make every student a citizen of the intellectual 
world. It has sought, in President Stryker's 
phrase, " not to turn steel into tools, but to turn 
iron into steel." 

Our early founders reproduced the ideal and 
method of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, 
which have for centuries aimed to " man the Brit- 
ish Empire." They also brought from England 
the idea of a college as a place of residence, where 
boys might eat and worship and learn and live to- 
gether under the strict and constant supervision 
of their teachers. In sharp distinction from the 



THE NEW ENGLAND COLLEGE 9 

medieval universities of the continent, where stu- 
dents migrated from place to place and teacher to 
teacher, was the common residence required in the 
New England college, accompanied by long lists of 
rules, enforced by tutorial vigilance and some- 
times by corporal punishment. A common eating- 
place was deemed essential. Daily chapel, usually 
held twice a day, brought the entire family to- 
gether, and offered opportunity for paternal coun- 
sel and for the practice of the students in public 
speech. At night the long corridors of the dormi- 
tory were often patrolled by professors, and some 
New England colleges adopted the rule in force at 
Princeton, whereby a professor might announce his 
presence outside a student's door by a peculiar 
stamp of his foot, which all students were forbid- 
den, under severe penalties, to counterfeit. 

Under such a regime the college was strictly 
in loco parentis in an age when parents were sel- 
dom accused of laxity in discipline. Hence the 
inner story of the colleges is one of " autocracy 
tempered by rebellion." The teachers were not 
specialists, but men of breadth of view, of demon- 
strated success in some calling, and of dominant 
personality. The one great gift of the early col- 
leges was the opportunity for the daily associa- 
tion of callow youth with some of the leading 
minds of their generation. When Bowdoin Col- 
lege had no laboratories, she had on her teaching 



10 WILLIAM e. P. FAUNCE 

staif Henry W. Longfellow. When Longfellow in 
his turn was a student at Harvard he wrote in his 
diary that after dining on boiled rice he " went to 
walk with Professor Felton." Truly a dinner of 
herbs was tolerable when followed by such a walk. 
When Brown University's total funds had reached 
thirty-one thousand dollars, Francis Wayland was 
molding her structure, and the real endowment of 
the university was thirty-one thousand dollars plus 
Francis Wayland. Mark Hopkins could make the 
" old log " a real substitute for library, laboratory, 
and apparatus, and the student whom he touched 
was awed and thrilled and inspired. 

Not only were the teachers of that early day 
often more dominant personalities than those of 
our own time, but they had far greater opportunity 
to enter into the student mind. Under the old uni- 
form curriculum all the students were together in 
every class, and the professor met them all, and 
usually every day. Sometimes one professor 
taught the class in several subjects, and President 
Hopkins at Williams instructed the senior class in 
all subjects throughout the year. Under such cir- 
cumstances there was an intimacy of intellectual 
acquaintance which has never been equaled else- 
where. The total weight of all a teacher's experi- 
ence, knowledge, conviction, was brought to bear 
on the student who, in significant phrase, " sat 
under him." Never, except possibly in the case of 



THE NEW ENGLAND COLLEGE 11 

English headmasters, like Arnold of Rugby, has 
the world seen greater opportunities for education 
by sheer contagion than in the early New England 
college. The enforced intimacy surely had its 
defects. The foibles of the teacher were obvious 
to all. The natural impulse of youth to rebel was 
encouraged by artificial and elaborate rules, with 
fines and penalties attached. But education by 
contagion, by persistent association of persons, 
has seldom had so fine a chance as it had among 
the New England hills. 

If architecture is, as it has been called, " frozen 
music," certainly college architecture may be 
called congealed philosophy of life. The beautiful 
quadrangles of Oxford, surrounded by closely ar- 
ticulated buildings of the Gothic order, speak 
clearly of the compactness and unity of a life in 
which state and church are indissolubly bound to- 
gether and both are exponents of order and beauty. 
No such quadrangles were built in New England. 
The only one ever projected was never completed. 
In the Puritan college each building, independent, 
isolated, seems to recognize no other structure on 
the horizon. Each one delights to express the 
independent action of some donor, the independent 
taste of some period, or the autocratic choice of 
some administrator. The " muses' factories," as 
Lowell called the old-time dormitories, were not the 
abodes of art or music or aesthetic taste. They 



12 WILLIAM H. P. FAUNCE 

sometimes became mere barracks, with no refining 
or softening influence on their inmates. In 1878 I 
lived in such barracks, bringing all water from the 
college pump up three flights of stairs to my room, 
and each morning depositing hot coals and ashes 
from my little stove upon the wooden floor in a 
corner of the hallway outside my door. Life was 
bare and chill and unadorned amid such surround- 
ings, but it furnished daily opportunity for the 
constant impact of strong, mature personalities on 
the unformed lives around them. Over each New 
England college might have been written the an- 
cient sentence : " Let us make man." The aim was 
not to push out the bounds of knowledge in any 
line, but so to associate the strong with the weak 
that the strength might be infused and imparted. 

What now shall we say of the more recent de- 
velopment of the New England college? How far 
is it true to its primal impulse, and how far is it 
being modified by the new occasions which teach 
new duties.'* 

The relation of the college to the Christian 
faith is still vital, but is expressed in entirely new 
ways. Most of our colleges are now free from 
denominational control, and the relations of church 
and college are simply those of vital sympathy and 
co-operation. There is nothing in the charters of 
Yale,Amherst^ Williams, Bowdoin, or Dartmouth to 
anchor those institutions to the Congregationalist 



THE NEW ENGLAND COLLEGE 13 

churches that gave them birth. If those churches 
should lose their interest in education or should 
become numerically feeble, undoubtedly those col- 
leges would drift into vital relations with other 
denominations. They exist not for the aggrandize- 
ment of the Congregationalist churches, not for 
propagating a doctrinal viewpoint, but as the free- 
will offering of the churches to the cause of Chris- 
tian education. The old days when every teacher 
at Yale must sign the Westminster Confession and 
look carefully after the orthodoxy of the students 
have gone forever. But has Christianity lessened 
its hold in consequence? On the contrary, those 
days of creed subscription on the part of every 
teacher were the days when French infidelity was 
rampant in American colleges and students called 
one another by the names of Voltaire and Paine 
and Bolingbroke. At the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century only two students could be found 
in one New England college who could call them- 
selves Christians. The orthodoxy enforced from 
above had produced by natural reaction complete 
skepticism below. 

To-day at Wesleyan, Colby, and Brown there 
are still some denominational restrictions that sur- 
vive, but they grow more attenuated year by year 
and by natural evolution will disappear. Yet the 
Christian forces in these institutions are not less- 
ened but rather are growing. Skepticism is no 



U WILLUM H. P. FAUNCE 

longer the badge of culture among undergraduates. 
In almost all our colleges the majority of the 
students are church members and are not ashamed 
of their faith. The foremost preachers of the 
country visit these colleges for a single service or 
for a residence of from one to three weeks. Chris- 
tian associations, supported by alumni contribu- 
tions, exist in all of them, and the secretaries are 
often able leaders of student opinion. The stu- 
dents are organized into committees for philan- 
thropic, educational, and religious work in the 
communities around them. If the devotional meet- 
ings have dwindled within the college, as they have 
without, the expression of Christian faith in prac- 
tical human helpfulness has grown more pro- 
nounced. 

At several New England colleges this last win- 
ter a series of special meetings has been held, 
intended to move the students to personal decision, 
and has been attended by unusually large result. 
All pressure on the part of the Faculty has ceased. 
Required church attendance has vanished from 
most of our colleges. Creed subscription by mem- 
bers of the teaching staff is not thought of. Re- 
ligion is no longer official, imposed from above ; 
it is the natural expression of the aspiration of 
students and alumni. And this unofficial relation 
of church and college is proving vastly more fruit- 
ful in the maintenance of a Christian atmosphere 



THE NEW ENGLAND COLLEGE 15 

than all the old charter provisions for ecclesiastical 
control. The experience of the New England col- 
leges is that the oversight and ownership of a 
college by a denomination is often wise and abso- 
lutely necessary in the earlier years of college 
history. But as the college approximates to the 
university, if not in name, at least in standards 
and ideals, the control of the church becomes less 
helpful. Denominational control of a medical 
school or a law school is an advantage to neither 
school nor church. 

In America the function of the church has been 
to initiate, to start things. Its spiritual energy 
has impelled the church to establish charities which 
are later handed over to the state; to preach the 
duty of caring for the sick, and then to hand over 
that duty to the public hospital ; to lay educational 
foundations and without complaint see that an- 
other buildeth thereupon. The voluntary prin- 
ciple, in education as in worship, has in New 
England been found to vindicate itself in the course 
of the years. If the churches weaken in numbers 
or influence, then their influence in the colleges will 
decay. But if they increase their powers in the 
community, if they send their ministers into col- 
lege pulpits, and their laymen into the ranks of 
college officers and helpers, the non-official rela- 
tion of church and college may prove to be more 
helpful to both than any official control could be. 



16 WILLIAM H. P. FAUNCE 

Whatever may be true of new sections of our 
country, this is the lesson to be drawn from the 
educational experience of New England. Indeed, 
each denomination should allow those ministers 
who speak in the college vocabulary to spend a 
considerable portion of their time in addressing 
college assemblies. Their message is effective 
precisely because it is non-official. They have 
access to the student mind just because they are 
not examiners but inspirers. Such preachers find 
in the American college an audience more respon- 
sive than that which assembles in any church, and 
a task worthy of the highest human powers. In 
the words of President Fitch of Andover Theo- 
logical Seminary : " One of the significant happen- 
ings of our day is the passing of the spiritual and 
ethical control of the educated youth of America 
out of the hands of the churches, and its center- 
ing in the schools and colleges. It is largely true 
that the surest and most effective method of reach- 
ing the noblest instincts of the choicest men of the 
coming generation is through college rather than 
parochial preaching." * 

As regards the vocational element in education 
our colleges are now returning to their fundamental 
principle. They are perceiving that while they 
can never become professional schools, much less 
trade schools, they cannot permanently separate 
* Harvard Graduate Magazine, December, 1914. 



THE NEW ENGLAND COLLEGE 17 

culture from purpose. A purely abstract culture 
having no goal in real life, unrelated to the life 
that throbs and surges outside the college fence, is 
really an ignis fatuus, and, if attained, a positive 
disqualification for public service. Scholasticism 
in college has hindered thousands of young men 
from real achievement, and left them critical, in- 
trospective, hesitant, incapable of swift decision 
and whole-hearted action. The problem before our 
colleges is to return to the original idea of educa- 
tion as fundamental equipment for vocation, but 
so to interpret vocation as to preserve for the col- 
lege broad horizons, generous sympathies, insight 
into the best that the world has said or done, and 
profound religious faith. 

No longer do we prepare men for the learned pro- 
fessions only, but it is our task to give the broad- 
est training for highly specialized tasks. We must 
equip men not only for pulpit and bar, but for 
mill and store and farm ; men who can earn their 
living without losing their life. Our colleges must 
see to it that the mechanician is trained in exact 
science, and that the man who plants corn shall 
understand the laws of heredity. We want the 
architect to be familiar with the bequest of Greece 
and Rome, the engineer to construct highways for 
human progress, the mill-owner to care not only 
for his products but for the producers. We want 
the storekeeper to know something of the great 



18 WILLUM H. P. FAUNCE 

trade routes of civilization, and the selectman of 
the village to understand his relation to Magna 
Charta and the compact signed by the Pilgrims on 
the Mayflower. We want all modern men to see 
their daily toil as a part of the task of rebuilding 
the world. We want the stone-cutter to understand 
his relation to Praxiteles and Michael Angelo, the 
farmer to know something of Virgil's Georgics and 
the songs of Theocritus, and the school-teacher 
to be a student of Plato's Republic and More's 
Utopia. Our high vocation is to receive the torch 
of enlightenment from past generations and hand 
it to the generations that follow. A man's vo- 
cation is to be a good citizen, a faithful hus- 
band, a pure-blooded father, a helpful neighbor, 
a dynamic in his community. 

One of Goethe's more far-reaching sentences is 
this : " We exist for the sake of what can be ac- 
complished in us, not that which can be done 
through us." There we have the eternal antithesis 
which haunts all educational enterprise. Are we 
then divided into two hostile camps? Shall one- 
half the world emphasize the things done through 
us, while the other half emphasizes achievement 
within, exalting culture? The New England col- 
lege affords some reconciliation of these opposing 
viewpoints. It declines to become a group of 
professional schools. It declines to interpret a 
man's vocation as the earning of his livelihood. It 



THE NEW ENGLAND COLLEGE 19 

will never confine itself to the technique of a single 
profession. But it is equally averse to a vague 
self-culture divorced from purpose. It affirms that 
something must be done within the student in order 
that something may be done through him. It con- 
siders the self-realization of the student only a 
step in the realization of the entire social order. 
The opening of the eyes of the soul, the intellectual 
and spiritual rebirth, is the essential thing in the 
educational process. But this, as our fathers 
clearly saw, is never to be attained apart from 
the ethical purpose which makes the culture of the 
individual an equipment for the service of the 
state. The college still aims to equip human 
beings not to be ministered unto, but to minister. 



THE PLACE OF THE LANGUAGES 

AND LITERATURES IN THE 

COLLEGE CURRICULUM 

PROFESSOR PAUL SHOREY , 

The chief lesson that I took away from my old 
Harvard course in theme-writing was the admoni- 
tion, " Always write about a proposition, never 
about a word." It is a sound principle, though 
systematically ignored by the most successful of 
American writers, Emerson, and in what threatens 
to be the most prolific branch of American litera- 
ture, the literature of education. The blessed 
word education is the sole theme of most educa- 
tional discourses. The speaker defines or sym- 
bolizes in that Mesopotamia his social ideal, in- 
dignantly rebukes our present defection from it, 
and apocalyptically prophesies its speedy real- 
ization by the short cut of a newly revealed method 
or a reformed curriculum. Ignoring what old 
logicians called the circumstance — the who, which, 
what, when, and whereby, for whom, we define 
education in the abstract as preparation for life 
or it may be as " a totality of co-ordinate and 
reasoned suggestions," and then endeavor to esti- 

31 



^2 PAUL SHOREY 

mate the values of particular methods and studies 
by more or less plausible deductions from this in- 
determinate ideal. But obviously there is not one 
education, there are many kinds and grades. And 
the value and significance of any study relates it- 
self not to education in general, but to some specific 
type. 

Nothing is easier than to praise any study to 
its lovers and adepts, unless it be to demonstrate 
the uselessness of any study to those who are 
totally ignorant of it. All men naturally love 
knowledge, and most men, like Plato's philosophic 
dog, express their detestation of ignorance by 
barking at what they don't know. Artem non odit 
nisi ignarus is the apt inscription on the Kaiser 
Friedrich Museum in Berlin. " We all," says Mr. 
Chesterton, " have a dark feeling of resistance 
towards people we have never met, and a profound 
and manly dislike of authors we have never read." 

To escape from these unprofitable generalities of 
educational debate, we must narrow the vague sug- 
gestions of a word to the definite implications of 
a proposition or a concatenation of propositions. 
This task is, in part, accomplished for us in the 
assignment of our topics to-day. For a topic is 
something midway between a word and a proposi- 
tion. The phrasing of my topic relieves me from 
the tiresome necessity of reminding you that I am 
not proposing to force Greek particles or old 



LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 23 

French epics upon the negroes of Mr. Booker 
Washington's industrial school, or to substitute 
Latin for vocational training in the preparation 
for life of the seventy-five thousand boys between 
the ages of fourteen and sixteen, whom the gap 
between required school and permitted employment 
turns loose upon the streets of our metropolis. I 
don't have to explain the value of literary and 
linguistic studies either to a Montessori mother or 
to a Professor of Plumbing in a continuation 
school. The American college exists, and we are 
not to-day discussing either its abolition or the 
possibility of making a million if you leave school 
at the age of fourteen. 

To go to college at all is to decide that you 
can spare three or four years for studies that are 
something more than the irreducible minimum of 
equipment for citizenship, and something other 
than the vocational or professional mastery of the 
breadwinning specialty. Our theme is the contri- 
bution of literary and linguistic studies to that 
type of education. 

Here another quicksand of futile logomachy 
threatens to engulf us, the obsolete and now mean- 
ingless controversy between science and classics. 
Science has definitively won. I may deprecate the 
extravagance of a biological colleague who tells a 
Phi Beta Kaj^pa audience that the whole of modem 
civilization is the expression of a single idea, the 



24 PAUL SHOREY 

looking into nature by experiments. But even this 
challenge cannot provoke the humanist to extenu- 
ate the educational value of science, or deny its 
indisputable leadership in modern life. If these 
considerations move any undergraduate to spe- 
cialize exclusively in the physical sciences, if he is 
quite certain that for him as for Darwin science 
and the domestic affections will meet all require- 
ments of mind and heart and soul, there is for him 
nothing more to be said. But experience and the 
statistics of registration show that for the ma- 
jority of students physical science alone does not 
suffice. They wish to study man, society, human- 
ity, and humanity's ideals of beauty, truth, and 
goodness. And this fact at once converts the 
obsolete and fallacious alternative classics or sci- 
ence into the larger question of the significance 
of linguistic and literary studies, both as a prepa- 
ration for and an integral part of the study of 
man. 

The study of language and of literature are 
united in my topic, and are in fact interrelated 
and interdependent. They are not, however, iden- 
tical. On the contrary, in the rivalries of actual 
educational practice they unfortunately may be- 
come adversaries. It may appear poor strategy to 
dwell upon this dissidence while pleading the com- 
mon cause. But the very existence of serious 
literary study depends upon the maintenance of 



LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 25 

the distinction. This statement tells you that if 
compelled to wear a label or fly a flag, I should be 
found in the camp of literature. But though I 
shall abbreviate the plea, I do not intend to betray 
the cause of the half of my subject which appeals 
to me personally the least. 

The place that the study of language holds in 
a rationally ordered college curriculum is secured 
by at least four considerations: 1) French and 
German are indispensable tools, in every domain 
of knowledge, as Latin is for all historical and 
literary scholarship. 2) The technical study of 
linguistics has the same claim to a place as an 
option in the curriculum as any other technical 
specialty. 3) Language is so inextricably bound 
up with the higher intellectual functions of man 
that some systematic and analytic study of its 
structure and logic is for the normal student a 
condition of the full development of his powers 
both of thought and expression. This discipline 
may be imparted by analytic and critical study 
of the vernacular. But an immense experience 
proves that some foreign language, and preferably 
a synthetic, classical language, is the best educa- 
tional instrument for this purpose. The pure 
bluffs of the assertion that such generalized intel- 
lectual discipline is a superstition of the apologist 
for classics exploded by modern science will 
merely damage the reputation of every psychol- 



26 PAUL SHOREY 

ogist who endeavors to impose it upon the public. 
Diatribes denying all disciplinary and general in- 
tellectual values to the study of language may be 
found in the literature of controversy. But the 
psychologist who seriously maintains this thesis 
only writes himself down as incompetent in his 
own specialty. The absolute affirmation that con- 
ceptual thought cannot exist without language 
requires qualification and admits of debate. But 
in practice the two are so indissolubly associated 
that it is almost impossible to develop and im- 
practicable to study the one apart from the other. 
And experimental psychology, as soon as it ap- 
proaches this higher aspect of mind, is compelled 
to undertake in the laboratory with falsifying and 
artificial simplifications and grotesquely undis- 
criminating acquaintance with the material in 
which it works experiments which observant teach- 
ers and students of language are conducting with 
greater precision and subtlety every day of their 
lives. 

Lastly, language is the indispensable key to 
literature. I intend no illiberal disdain for trans- 
lations, popular lectures, and other substitutes 
for the best. But it cannot be the chief office of 
the college to obliterate distinctions and solicit the 
customer to content himself with something 
" equally as good." Phonographs and chromos 
have their uses. But the hearth of scholarship and 



LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 27 

culture is not the place for the gas log. Only the 
original text can communicate the finer shades of 
thought, the harmonies of sound, the soul of 
poetry and eloquence. A truly intelligent reading 
of our own older literature, of Tennyson, Pope, 
and Milton even, demands of the speakers of 
the present-day American vernacular a linguistic 
study differing only in degree from that which 
Latin provides in a simpler and more effective 
form. The heresy that a translation will serve 
as well as the original, and the fallacy that noth- 
ing short of complete mastery of a language can 
profit by the original, have been too often ex- 
posed to merit further respectful consideration. 
The student of the original not only may also 
use translations, but he is the only one who can 
use them intelligently. And even a little knowl- 
edge of the original language doubles their value 
for him. 

The place of linguistic study, then, is secure. 
For the specialist it is an end in itself. For the 
majority it is an instrument and a key, an in- 
strument of intellectual discipline and a key to 
the study of literature and the history of ideas. 
Our colleagues in linguistics will view this dis- 
tinction with suspicion, and our colleagues in gen- 
eral literature will be impatient of it. Neverthe- 
less it is vital. Culture and liberal education must 
steer a safe middle course between the rocks of 



28 PAUL SHOREY 

technical linguistics and the frothy whirlpools of 
dilettanteism. This topic would demand a volume 
for itself, a volume which in some sort already 
exists in Professor Babbitt's vigorous but partisan 
book on literature and the American college. Here 
I can only indicate in passing what seems to me 
the formula of judicious compromise. The domi- 
nant aim of collegiate linguistics should be the 
interpretation, the full appreciation, of the mean- 
ing of great literary texts. Limitation to this aim 
will yield if not all yet enough of the peculiar dis- 
ciplinary values of linguistic study. More than 
this is specialization in the science of language, 
and from the point of view of the student of 
literature and the history of ideas, pedantry. Less 
than this is laxity and dilettanteism. 

The application of this general principle to the 
specific tasks of a language classroom demands 
some discrimination and some self-restraint on the 
part of the instructor. But it is entirely feasible. 
The teacher who really knows the language he pro- 
fesses to teach knows or can ascertain with 
approximate and practically sufficient certainty 
whether a given item of syntax, accidence, etymol- 
ogy, or lexicography is really needed for the in- 
telligent appreciation of the authors, or whether 
it merely belongs to the order of facts which help 
him to settle hotVs business, properly base oun, 
and perfect his own private theory of the irregular 



LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 29 

verbs. No one, of course, expects a meticulous, 
pettifogging consistency in such discriminations. 
But the broad general principle is valid, and 
should hold for all collegiate teaching of lan- 
guage, except, of course, that which is avowedly 
practical and colloquial at one extreme, or admit- 
tedly specialized for future students of linguistics 
at the other. 

In all this we have taken for granted that the 
study of literature takes precedence of the mere 
study of language, and is indeed one of the chief 
constituents and supreme ends of a truly liberal 
education. What else could we do? To a life- 
long student of literature, to one who has the read- 
ing habit, the request for an apology for the study 
of literature is like a demand for proof of the 
utility of the air he breathes or the water he 
drinks. Life without letters is a living death, he 
murmurs. " You don't play whist, young man. 
What a sad old age you are preparing for your- 
self," is infinitely truer in the application, " you 
are not forming the taste for good and varied 
reading, young man." It is impossible in twenty 
minutes to justify an ideal and a philosophy of 
life. The apologist for literary study in the col- 
lege can at the most remove a few misconcep- 
tions and repeat a few commonplaces. I need 
hardly repeat the well-worn topics of the consola- 
tions of literature and the praise of books from 



so PAUL SHOREY 

Cicero to Richard of Bury, from Petrarch to 
Ruskin and Frederic Harrison. Truisms may be 
staled by repetition. They are not, as some epi- 
grammatic prophets of the up-to-date fancy, 
thereby converted into falsities. Quotations from 
the eloquent literature in commendation of books 
and reading would merely illustrate and adorn 
our thesis. They would not prove it. An equal 
array of authorities could be mustered against 
self-stultification and the suppression of originality 
through the abandonment of the mind to other 
men's ideas. Scientific men repeat the epigram of 
a great philosopher and man of science, that if 
he had read as much as other men, he would be as 
ignorant as they. And Hazlitt, Emerson, Lowell, 
and a long succession of modern essayists have re- 
written Montaigne's essay on the ignorance of the 
learned and the futility of mere bookishness. But 
it may be observed that they do not practice what 
they preach. And Shakespeare's " How well he's 
read to reason against reading " hoists them all 
with their own petard. Lowell, who elsewhere 
boasts himself to be the last of the great readers, 
was reading ten hours a day, pen in hand, when he 
praised the " gamey flavor of the bookless man," 
and proclaimed that " one drop of ruddy human 
blood is worth more than all the distillation of the 
library." 

But why make a study and task work of what 



LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 81 

should be a delight? Why force our tastes and 
strain our apprehensions in conformity to outworn 
traditions and dogmatic conventions? An enter- 
taining essay of the witty novelist James Payn gives 
trenchant expression to the feeling that we can- 
not always live on the heights, but must occasion- 
ally let ourselves down to a scrofulous French novel 
and a hammock. The ingenious Mr. Balfour has 
made an acute and plausible plea for the second- 
rate book as nearer to us, and therefore often more 
practically helpful and instructive, than the mas- 
terpiece. And the small fry of contemporary 
story-tellers, journalists, and minor critics inces- 
santly denounce the tyranny of the books that no 
gentleman's library should be without, insist that 
modern man must find his chief solace and enter- 
tainment in the literature that portrays the pass- 
ing panorama of the life that now is, and affirm 
that we shall best realize both the pleasures and 
the profits of reading by yielding ourselves un- 
critically to the spontaneous appeal of what most 
easily interests and attracts our relaxed moods and 
our natural taste for bathos. They might as well 
say that a perpetual surfeit of chocolate sundae 
and cream cakes will meet all the ends of alimenta- 
tion as well as a varied and substantial diet of 
wholesome food. It is only the accumulated and 
compounded interest on the acquisitions of a studi- 
ous youth that will make reading a lifelong and 



as PAUL SHOREY 

dependable joy which no vicissitudes of fortune 
can take away. 

If this pleasure were purchased at some price 
of disciplinary pain in youth, it would only follow 
the general law of life and education. But the 
popular notion of the special distastefulness and 
futility of the schoolroom inculcation of literature 
belongs to the type of commonplaces that owe 
their vogue not to their truth but to their flatter- 
ing of ordinary human nature and their conven- 
ience as texts for the ready writer. " If ten gentle- 
men," says old Ascham, " be asked why they forget 
so soon in court what they were so long learning 
in school, eight of them, or let me be blamed, will 
lay the fault on their ill handling by their school- 
masters." Except in the schools of Utopia, all 
subjects are liable to be badly taught. But we 
specially resent mediocre teaching of literature be- 
cause of the more poignant contrast there between 
the actuality and that which might, or we fancy 
might, have been. " Farewell, Horace, whom I 
hated so," cries Byron. But in fact Byron did not 
hate Horace in the least. And feeble as the teach- 
ing of language and literature at Harrow school 
may then have been, it was that and that only which 
made possible the wider reading in the Latinized 
literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
turies that formed Byron's mind and informed his 
writing. 



LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 33 

" Nothing that my tyrants knew or taught I 
cared to learn," boasts the rebellious Shelley in the 
Revolt of Islam. Yet where, save under the 
tyranny of an English classical schoolroom, did 
he learn to construe the ode of Pindar from which 
the poem takes its motto, the Lucretius from which 
he drew the philosophy of Queen Mab, the 
^'schylus that inspired Hellas and Prometheus Un- 
bound, the dirges of Bion and Moschus on which 
he patterned Adonais, the Virgil which reread in 
his summer walks amid the Italian hills he trans- 
muted into the Witch of Atlas, the Plato that was 
the chief inspiration of his maturer life and poetry, 
the Sophocles clasped to his bosom in death beneath 
the Tyrrhene wave? And Shelley here is but the 
type of the ungrateful graduates who denounce 
the salutary restrictions of the schoolroom be- 
cause they were sometimes irksome to the spirit of 
youth or have been outgrown in maturity. Of 
course the forbidden books seem more attractive 
than the prescribed task work. And of course the 
ripened mind discovers meanings in the old school 
texts which the schoolmaster did not perceive or 
despaired of imparting. But these peevish con- 
trasts afford no just measure of the value of the 
collegiate study of literature. To judge of that, 
we must compare the graduate who has received 
this imperfect initiation with the utter helpless- 
ness and bafflement in the presence of a great 



84 PAUL SHOREY 

library of the man who is launched on the infinite 
sea of literature without compass or guide, who has 
no chart in his memory of the main routes and cur- 
rents, who has no conception of the humanistic tra- 
ditions and accepted values, no standards of refer- 
ence for agreement or dissent; the man who has 
never learned through the critical reading under 
guidance of a few good books something of the 
principles of interpretation that are essential to 
the right understanding of any book. Col. Hig- 
ginson once wrote a paper entitled, " Ought women 
to learn the alphabet?" The question assigned 
me to-day is. Ought college students to learn 
to read? The mere " literacy " of tlie statistician, 
the ability to spell out words and catch impressions 
or prejudices from the yellow headlines, is not 
reading. A large part even of non-literary educa- 
tion consists mainly in teaching those who think 
that they can read that they cannot. The study 
of the law, for example, is largely the learning to 
read with nice appreciation of the force and bear- 
ing of every word and qualification on the defini- 
tion and determination of human relations and 
rights. And one-half of the mastery of every 
science is the substitution in a limited field of the 
exact and discriminating reading of the expert for 
the slovenly, confused, and equivocal reading of 
the layman. Now the collegiate study of litera- 
ture, the slow critical reading of a few of the 



LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 35 

world's masterpieces under competent guidance, 
is just learning how to read the book of human 
experience outside of the specialized sciences real 
or imaginary. 

The sciences emerged and were differentiated 
from the less determined thinking of Greek philos- 
ophy, and now that our faith in absolute meta- 
physics is gone, the sciences merge and find their 
limit in the vast ocean of common sense and hu- 
manistic tradition of which the world's best liter- 
ature is the expression. Literature is, so to speak, 
the residuary legatee of all the stores of experi- 
ence, the discriminations of thought, the a?sthetic 
sensibilities that science has not yet been able to 
catalogue, subdue, systematize, administer, and 
annex. The serious and sincere study of great 
literature not only serves to develop and refine sen- 
sibilities which exclusive devotion to the discipline 
of physical science may leave to atrophy, but it is 
the best, the only sure corrective to the chief 
source of modern fallacy, the preposterous and 
premature claims of the inchoate and as yet 
pseudo-sciences. We all acknowledge, even when 
we do not greatly esteem, the first service. Every- 
body recognizes that four years in a chemical 
laboratory may not, in Matthew Arnold's classical 
example, teach a boy that " Can you not wait 
upon the lunatic " is not a felicitous equivalent of 
" Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased." 



36 PAUL SHOREY 

Or to adopt and adapt from Mr. Bailey's recent 
book on Milton a less obvious illustration, a man 
may be able, as Renan complimented Pasteur on 
doing, to distinguish unfailingly the right hand 
acid from the left hand acid and yet fail to appre- 
ciate the difference between Wordsworth's 

" Negro ladies in white muslin gowns " 

and Milton's 

"Dusk faces in white silken turbans wreathed." 

The aesthetic value, then, of literary study is con- 
descendingly admitted. Its intellectual service, 
both to the enlargement and the clarifying of our 
thought, is overlooked. Matthew Arnold's phrase 
about the best that has been thought and said is 
almost too hackneyed even for allusion. But as 
Socrates once observed, so long as fallacies are re- 
peated, we must meet them with truisms. Goethe, 
De Quincey, Ruskin, Emerson, Arnold, and Morley 
in their attempts to define literature all say essen- 
tially the same thing. " Society," says Emerson, 
" has at all times the same want, the need of one 
sane man with adequate powers of expression, to 
hold up each object of monomania in its right 
relation." Emerson, the hero worshipper, personi- 
fies this function in one representative man. Ar- 
nold generalizes it as culture. " Culture," he says, 



LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 37 

" is always assigning to system makers and sys- 
tems a smaller share in the bent of human destiny 
than their friends like." 

Here you have the real ground of the hostility to 
serious literary study as a part of the college cur- 
riculum sometimes manifested by the system mon- 
gers, the prophets of pseudo-science, the pedagog- 
ical psychologists, the men of one trade-mark idea 
who are seeking to dominate the education and the 
intellectual life of our time. Literary culture 
resembles travel and the frequentation of good so- 
ciety in that it acquaints us with many ideas and 
harmonizes them not by the goose-step of a system, 
but through the give and take of civilized inter- 
course and the adjustments of common sense and 
right feeling. It is not good for an idea to live 
alone and get accustomed to having its own way 
always. A small quantity of gas, physicists tell 
us, would expand to infinity in a vacuum. And 
something like this happens to any lonely little 
idea that finds lodgment in a vacuous and system- 
building brain. And the harm extends not merely 
to the intelligence but to the feelings. For just 
as water boils too easily in a thin and rarefied 
atmosphere, even so does the little pot soon hot of 
the sentimentalist who is the predestined prey of 
the system monger boil and slop over at tem- 
peratures which only diffuse a genial warmth 
through a mind restrained by the circumambient at- 



38 PAUL SHOREY 

mospheric pressure of the world's best traditional 
thought. I should violate my own principles if 
I treated metaphors and similes as arguments. In 
the brief space assigned me, I could not even glance 
at many of the topics pertinent to my theme. Still 
less could I prove anything. I can at the most 
suggest some of the ways in which precision and 
breadth of literary culture in youth may serve to 
counteract the chief intellectual disease of our 
time. When four of Benedick's five wits go halt- 
ing off from the encounter with Beatrice, we 
attribute his discomfiture to the intuitive quick- 
ness of Beatrice's woman's wit. But it is not 
solely Miss Agnes Repplier's native cleverness that 
has enabled her to overthrow in controversy some 
of the world's most pompous authorities in social 
science, history, and diplomacy, and make their 
arguments look sick and silly in what Lord Mor- 
ley calls " the double light of the imaginative and 
practical reason." It is largely because year after 
year she has been steeping her mind in the common 
sense of the world's best books, while they have 
been reading only dissertations, documents, proto- 
cols, and the erudite treatises of their colleagues. 
And to-day the adequacy of our President for his 
heavy burden, our restful and grateful confidence 
that he will never fail to speak the sane, con- 
siderate, and nobly representative word for Amer- 
ica, is mainly due to the fact that though a pro- 



LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 39 

fessor, he is not a professor of a pseudo-science, 
nor even a narrowly exclusive expert in his own 
special field of so-called political science. It is due 
mainly to his lifelong devotion to the study of 
" mere literature." 



THE PLACE OF THE NEWER 

HUMANITIES IN THE COLLEGE 

CURRICULUM 

DEAN CHARLES H. HASKINS 

The group of studies which I have been asked 
to represent in this conference, the so-called newer 
humanities, comprehends, as I understand it, his- 
tory and the various social sciences of economics, 
political science, and sociology. These differ from 
the natural sciences in that their subject-matter is 
man and human society; they differ from the hu- 
manities in the older sense of the word not only 
in their newness, but also in their immediate rela- 
tion to the social and political life of the present- 
day world. It is, indeed, possible to deny them 
the name of humanities altogether, if we limit our- 
selves to the narrower and merely aesthetic con- 
notation of the term as concerned only with litera- 
ture as an art of beautiful expression. If, how- 
ever, we take humanity in its historic contrast 
with divinity as the study of human affairs and 
interests • in contradistinction to theology, or 
if we take it in its Latin sense of humane and 
liberal culture {humanitas), we shall find good 

41 



42 CHARLES H. HASKINS 

warrant for its extension to these more modem 
constituents of a liberal education. 

That these studies are a comparatively recent 
element in the American college is a fairly ob- 
vious fact. The oldest of them, history, was kept 
subordinate to philology and theology until well 
into the nineteenth century and did not win an in- 
dependent place in our colleges, with a few notable 
exceptions, until well after the Civil War. Eco- 
nomics secured a foothold somewhat later, political 
science later still. Thirty years ago a term in 
Guizot's History of Civilization or Freeman's 
General Sketchy a term in some brief economic 
text, and a term on the Constitution of the United 
States constituted the sum and substance of the 
instruction in this group of subjects in a fair 
average of American colleges, where classics and 
mathematics were still required and the natural 
sciences already well established. These brief 
courses were given by the president, by the pro- 
fessor of philosophy, or by anyone else who had a 
vacant period or a broad back for college burdens, 
very rarely by one who had any special training 
whatever. The " fourteen-weeks " epoch in Amer- 
ican education lay heavily upon all new subjects 
and most heavily upon the newest. 

How all this has changed within a generation is 
a matter of common knowledge. New chairs have 
been established, special professors appointed, and 



PLACE OF NEWER HUMANITIES 43 

courses developed with some freedom and generally 
with wisdom. The process has gone on most 
rapidly in the universities, both state and private, 
often more slowly in the independent colleges, 
where the tradition of the older subjects is 
stronger and the need of response to popular de- 
mands less immediate, so that any generalization 
must take account of the unequal development of 
such instruction in different institutions. Never- 
theless, if these subjects have not fully come to 
their own in all colleges, the time has arrived when 
we can take account of stock and ask ourselves 
what are their real claims upon college authorities, 
what is their place in college education. Indeed, 
these questions have been asked many times al- 
ready, and one cannot even now hope to give 
them a new or a final answer. 

We must first of all disclaim any necessary an- 
tagonism between the newer humanities and the 
older, or between the humanities in general and 
science. No single group of studies is sufficient 
to occupy the whole field of education for any 
individual, and each group shades into the other. 
History has intimate relations to language, litera- 
ture, and the fine arts; economics has its mathe- 
matical and its psychological aspects ; while the 
methods and the results of modern science are of 
ever increasing importance in the study of all 
questions which concern the state and society. 



44 CHARLES H. HASKINS 

Much of the progress of knowledge in our gen- 
eration has been achieved in those borderlands 
where two or more subjects of inquiry meet, and 
the future scholar, as well as the general student, 
needs none of those water-tight bulkheads between 
different disciplines which the academic world has 
sometimes considered necessary for its safety. 
Least of all is the college a place for that in- 
tellectual arrogance and self-sufficiency which 
would limit the really significant in educa- 
tion to Greek or chemistry or economics or 
any other subject. All subjects are not of 
equal value, but no subject is of supreme or 
exclusive value, and none can be wisely studied 
in college or elsewhere apart from its relation to 
others. 

Among the various studies which contend in 
healthy rivalry for recognition at the hands of 
students and of college authorities, the newer 
humanities occupy a central position, intermediate 
between the older humanities on the one hand and 
the natural sciences on the other. Their subject- 
matter is human, their method scientific. Taken 
broadly, they comprehend the whole range of or- 
ganized human interests in the past and in the 
present, and subject them to critical analysis in 
the search for truth. They cannot experiment, 
only in part can they observe; dependent upon 
indirect methods for their knowledge of the past, 



PLACE OF NEWER HUMANITIES 45 

whether recent or remote, they must employ the 
most penetrating criticism and laborious and im- 
partial sifting of evidence. Applying the critical 
and exact methods of science to the rich and 
varied material of human life, they appeal to 
imagination and sympathy at the same time that 
they train the judgment and enrich the under- 
standing. If our curriculum is to have a center 
or core, it may well be sought in this great con- 
necting group of subjects, which, by joining the 
study of literature to the present and bringing the 
student of nature into touch with the world of 
man, furnish a natural corrective to the one- 
sidedness of a training which is purely literary or 
purely scientific. 

Central with respect to the other subjects of 
the curriculum, the newer humanities are unique 
in their relation to social action. It is their dis- 
tinguishing characteristic that they deal with or- 
ganized society and especially with the state, and 
thus constitute the necessary preparation for in- 
telligent participation in social and civic activity. 
They give a body of knowledge acquired nowhere 
else, and they are unique in training the judgment 
upon political and social facts. They are thus 
practical, not in the narrower sense as leading to 
a livelihood, but in the larger sense of preparing 
for life. This preoccupation with practical mat- 
ters is sometimes made the occasion for reproach. 



46 CHARLES H. HASKINS 

but it is a reproach which, if properly understood, 
the social sciences are quite willing to bear. " In 
whatever it is our duty to act, those matters also 
it is our duty to study," said Thomas Arnold, and 
he cannot be accused of being an educational 
Philistine. 

If all this seem somewhat abstract, there is an- 
other set of reasons why the newer humanities 
should have a large place in the curriculum, 
namely, that students are interested in them. We 
may believe with Mr. Dooley that undergraduates 
should study only what is " onpleasant " ; the 
effect of this has too often been that the under- 
graduate refuses really to study at all. Whatever 
his concern with more remote or abstruse themes — 
and I do not mean in the least to disparage their 
importance — he is likely, if he is normal and 
healthy, to read the newspapers and to take an 
interest in what is going on about him. He bears' 
of wars and rumors of wars, of social questions 
and political problems, and he realizes, or ought 
to realize, that these are questions which concern 
him and will depend in some measure upon him for 
their solution. In a democratic society with active 
public discussion, healthy young men cannot fail 
to want to know about the life of the world in 
which they live and their relations to it. Given the 
students' interest, it is the function of the college 
to guide and broaden and develop that interest un- 



PLACE OF NEWER HUMANITIES 47 

til it eventuates in intelligent citizenship and in- 
telligent leadership. 

This is a well-worn theme which ought now to 
require no elaboration, but I may be permitted to 
illustrate it in one of its aspects. The present 
European war has shown, by impressive and even 
tragic examples, that the days of our national 
isolation are over and that we can no longer re- 
frain from following closely those movements of 
world politics to which the United States has so 
long been indifferent. Whether we like it or not, 
we must prepare to make decisions on matters of 
grave international import which will compel us 
to reconsider traditional policies, to develop new 
ones, and to examine questions of war and peace in 
the light of actual fact and not of sudden impulse 
or abstract theory. Such a crisis finds us as a 
people extraordinarily ignorant of history, of in- 
ternational law, and of those economic conditions 
which shape international policies ; and it finds us 
even more deficient in an international habit of 
thought and in the sense for foreign affairs. In the 
formation of an enlightened, just, and far-sighted 
public opinion in international matters the colleges 
must take the lead. The response during the 
present year to courses and special lectures bear- 
ing upon these subjects shows that our students 
are ready to do their part, but much remains to be 
done from the side of college authorities to guide 



48 CHARLES H. HASKINS 

and deepen this interest in the direction of a 
sane and intelligent international-mindedness. It 
is particularly upon the departments of history, 
government, and economics that this new obliga- 
tion falls, and it is a national duty to give them 
adequate opportunities. 

I am well aware that there is an obvious danger 
in the over-emphasis of the immediate and the 
actual, and that we are already beginning to see a 
certain thinness and lack of depth in some of our 
instruction, particularly on the side of applied 
economics, sociology, and descriptive political sci- 
ence. Some college instructors in these fields lack 
perspective and breadth and thoroughness of train- 
ing, and it is not surprising that their defects are 
magnified in their students to the point of con- 
tempt for the past and its contributions to culture, 
and of a blind faith in the saving virtue of mere 
information in political and social matters. The 
narrowness of the supposedly practical is in the 
long run more dangerous than the narrowness of 
the idealist, since this can always be in some meas- 
ure corrected by contact with the everyday Tvovld 
of later life, while the outlook and vision which 
one misses in college days are generally lost for 
good. " Why," it may be asked, " spend the 
precious time of the college upon the contents of 
the newspapers and magazines? If our students 
study the same problems as the man in the street. 



PLACE OF NEWER HUMANITIES 49 

what doth it profit them to go to college? Let us 
subscribe for more periodicals and put the boy to 
work ! " The answer to this lies not in a different 
subject-matter but in a different treatment. The 
social sciences must be approached, not as material 
for a momentary sensation or occasional debate, 
but as requiring thorough study and hard thinking 
and as needing to be seen in their larger relations 
to human experience. Against the treatment 
which is merely informational and descriptive 
must be set the careful analysis of scientific 
economics and the science of government ; undue 
absorption in the ever-insistent but fugitive pres- 
ent must be prevented by the enlarging and hu- 
manizing study of the thought, the literature and 
the achievements of the past. 

Fortunately, through the study of history the 
newer humanities can supply, from their own 
ranks, the corrective to many of these evils. His- 
tory offers not only a body of information con- 
cerning the past life of the race, but also a method 
of inquiry upon which the social sciences rest, and 
a genetic point of view by which the present can 
be measured and understood in its relations to the 
past out of which it has come. History stirs the 
student's imagination, steadies his judgment, and 
serves as the intermediary between literary studies 
on the one hand and the social sciences on the 
other. The time has come when we might as well 



50 CHARLES H. HASKINS 

admit frankly, however much we may deplore the 
fact, that for the great body of our college stu- 
dents the classics have lost their hold as the basis 
of general education, and that for the present gen- 
eration the chief opportunity for giving the back- 
ground and breadth of view which our conceptions 
of culture still demand is to be found in the study 
of history. For most of our students the great 
avenue to the feeling and experience of the race 
lies through the vital study of the historic past, 
approached not as something dead or remote but 
as something full and rich, varied in its interest 
and many-sided in its appeal, through which alone 
we can hope to understand the present which it 
has produced. Even in so modern a subject as 
history, it is necessary to resist those ultra-moderns 
whose historical interests are circumscribed by the 
past few years or who, under the specious theory 
of apperception, would devote so much of our study 
to the recent and the local as to crowd out the 
larger and more humane study of the past and 
obscure the unity and continuity of its history. 
Historical near-sightedness must not deprive us 
of the base-line which the remoter past affords 
for an intelligent study of the present, and even 
the most materialistic of historians must, In dealing 
with historical facts, take account of their mass as 
well as of the inverse square of their distance. To 
the real teacher of history the whole of the past 



PLACE OF NEWER HUMANITIES 51 

is alive and no part is too remote to touch the 
imagination and understanding of his students. 

There are obviously important questions respect- 
ing the relations of the newer humanities to one 
another as well as respecting their collective place 
in the college curriculum, but in neither case can 
they receive a final answer or one of universal ap- 
plication. Much will inevitably depend upon the 
traditions of the college, upon its resources, upon 
the personality of its different professors, as well 
as upon the changing position of various studies 
as instruments of education. For reasons which 
have already been indicated, history must always 
be largely represented, as furnishing the materials 
and the methods of the other subjects of this group 
and as affording the necessary background and 
connections with other fields. The scientific study 
of government, always closely connected with his- 
tory on the one hand and with law on the other, 
has recently shown a tendency to emphasize its in- 
dependence from history and its relations with law. 
As a subject of undergraduate study, however, its 
legal aspects are of less significance than its his- 
torical ones, and its professors have especial need 
of a broad historical training, while at the same 
time they must be ever ready to bring their stu- 
dents into touch with the concrete reality of actual 
government. The inevitable development of sepa- 
rate instruction in political science must not be al- 



52 CHARLES H. HASKINS 

lowed to obscure its intimate relations to history. 
Economics has gone further than political science 
in the direction of distinct organization and has 
secured general recognition as a separate depart- 
ment with a growing body of instruction and a 
growing appeal to the American undergraduate. 
Here again, however, the tendency to short courses 
on current problems must be resisted by emphasis, 
on the one hand upon the economic history which 
shows their genesis, and on the other hand upon the 
more scientific and disciplinary aspects of the 
study as seen in the analytical processes of eco- 
nomic theory and the exact training of economic 
measurements. The close connections of eco- 
nomics and government must likewise not be for- 
gotten. The latest arrival in this group of sub- 
jects, sociology, has a less certain position, owing 
partly to its newness and partly to its vastness. 
There are even those who insist that its newness is 
an inherent quality and that its vast programme 
of co-ordinating scientifically all social knowl- 
edge is fundamentally impossible of execution. 
Without entering into this question, it may be 
suggested that, for the present, sociology as 
an undergraduate study is valuable chiefly as giv- 
ing a significant point of view, and that, until Its 
content and method are more thoroughly worked 
out, undergraduates cannot to advantage substi- 
tute extended elections in this field for the more 



PLACE OF NEWER HUMANITIES 53 

highly organized and clearly defined social sci- 
ences of economics and government. 

Nowhere does the personality of the teacher 
count for more than in the study of the newer hu- 
manities, for nowhere is the content of instruc- 
tion more varied and its methods more flexible. In 
the somewhat ambitious Amherst plan of introduc- 
ing freshmen to the whole range of the humanistic 
sciences the whole responsibility rests, and must 
rest, upon the professor in charge. No book or 
set of books has envisaged that vast and unsolved 
problem. If we simplify the task by subdividing 
it, the problem has been transformed, not solved, 
and a new and difficult problem of co-ordination 
has been added. The unity of the newer humanities 
is in danger of disappearing with the multiplica- 
tion of departments and courses, and their cultural 
value is correspondingly weakened unless some serir- 
ous counteracting effort be exerted towards corre- 
lating the student's attainments in diverse fields. 
It should be observed in this connection that no 
subjects lend themselves better to some form of 
tutorial instruction, and none stand in greater need 
of the co-ordinating final examination at the end 
of the undergraduate course to which such instruc- 
tion can with much profit be directed. If, as many 
of us believe, the universal American practice of 
awarding degrees upon the basis of a mere ac- 
cumulation of isolated credits is wrong, both in 



64 CHARLES H. HASKINS 

principle and in its results, the evils of the sys- 
tem are greatest in those subjects where there is 
not, as in mathematics and many branches of sci- 
ence, a progressive correlation inherent in the 
nature of the subject, but where, as in the more 
descriptive fields of English literature and history, 
the order and advancement of courses is more or 
less fortuitous and the later courses do not de- 
pend upon the earlier in any such close sequence 
of necessary prerequisites. The demand that the 
candidate for the bachelor's degree show some defi- 
nite result from his college education beyond the 
scoring of a certain number of units of credit is 
most imperative where the courses of the senior 
year do not involve and test his whole previous 
training. A comprehensive final examination 
which shall accomplish this object presupposes a 
considerable amount of co-ordinating instruction 
for each student, and this of course calls for addi- 
tional expenditure of energy and of money. 

The fact is that our teaching of the newer hu- 
manities has been and is too cheap. No studies are 
more intimately dependent upon the library, yet 
what college has done for its library what it has 
done for its laboratories, or furnished duplicate 
copies of reference books as it furnishes duplicate 
apparatus and laboratory supplies, or provided 
assistance and supervision for its students in the 
library as it gives them without question to its 



PLACE OF NEWER HUMANITIES 55 

students of science? How many colleges have 
developed professorships of history, government, 
economics, and social science in proportion to their 
departments of chemistry, physics, biology, geol- 
ogy, and astronomy? And how far do we require, 
or pei-mit, in these departments the same thorough- 
ness of teaching and individualization of instruc- 
tion which is demanded in other fields? The new 
problems which the teachers of the newer humani- 
ties have to face require far greater resources if 
they are to be wisely solved for the benefit of the 
student and of the country, resources of libraries, 
of materials for study, and above all of men. 
Moreover, the work of professors in these fields is 
not now confined to college walls, for they are 
called in increasing measure to render service in 
local and national affairs as expert advisers and 
as leaders of opinion. Within reasonable limits, 
such contact with the actual world enriches and 
vitalizes the work of the classroom, but the burden 
is often a severe one, and the college must be will- 
ing to carry its share in this labor for the com- 
munity by relieving such masters from academic 
routine and by guarding their leisure as men of 
learning and wise counsel. 

Finally, in all discussions of the value of dif- 
ferent studies and their place in college education 
we must beware of proceeding abstractly, as if we 
were dealing with a hypothetical undergraduate, 



56 CHARLES H. HASKINS 

without taking sufficient account of the different 
reactions of different students to the same sub- 
ject. We hear, for example, that the function of 
mathematical training is to develop the power of 
abstract reasoning, while we know that in a large 
number of instances it develops nothing higher 
than ingenuity. The delicate power of literary 
appreciation which the study of Greek produces 
among the elect few becomes with others merely a 
matching of words against words and of the forms 
of inflection against the corresponding sections of 
the grammar. So history can become a mere jum- 
ble of meaningless dates and events or a vague and 
pleasant — and often false — notion of progress. 
Wc must not forget that one student's imagination 
may be stirred by poetry, another's by history, 
another's by engineering. One may learn thor- 
oughness and scientific accuracy from a Greek 
grammar, another in the chemical laboratory. We 
cannot guarantee the reactions of any individual 
to any subject. The most that we can do is to 
place before him a sufficient variety of significant 
fields of learning and a body of vigorous, alert, 
and enthusiastic teachers, and trust to Providence 
for the results. If he is really stirred and stimu- 
lated in any direction, we ought to be thankful. 
The great defect in American college education 
is that it does not set the mass of students intel- 
lectually on fire. Our colleges are only in an im- 



PLACE OF NEWER HUMANITIES 57 

perfect degree intellectual institutions. The real 
rivalry is not one between classics and sociology, 
between history and chemistry, but a struggle with 
ignorance, materialism, and superficiality for the 
development of the intellectual life. We are wrest- 
ling against principalities and powers, against the 
rulers of the darkness of this world, and we need 
help from every quarter. Some of us would prefer 
to see students aroused by literature, others by 
science, others by economics, but the main thing is 
that they be aroused. The first business of the 
American college is to make its students intellec- 
tually keen about something; what that is, is a 
matter of less moment. Only — and here I come 
back to the newer humanities — as the world exists 
to-day, many students are likely to be moved only 
by studies which have some immediate and obvious 
relation to their own time, and to them the social 
sciences make an appeal which we cannot and must 
not disregard. It is the part of wisdom to take 
advantage of this legitimate interest, to offer it 
food to feed upon and wise and competent guid- 
ance, to discipline it by thorough and exact 
methods, to broaden it by a wide and humane 
knowledge of other nations and other times, and 
to steady it by a sane appreciation of the best 
things that have been said and done in the world. 
So shall the social sciences be humane as well as 
new, human as well as scientific. 



THE PLACE OF THE PHYSICAL 

AND NATURAL SCIENCES IN 

THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM 

PROFESSOR EDWIN G. CONKLIN 



From the beginnings of colleges and universities 
down to the present time some form of what wc 
now call science has held a well-recognized place 
in every plan of liberal education. In the Uni- 
versitas Studii Generalis of Paris, which was the 
mother of modem colleges and universities, the 
" Trivium " included grammar, logic and rhet- 
oric, and the " Quadrivium " arithmetic, geometry, 
astronomy, and music. Under the influence of 
Galileo and Newton physics, or what was long 
known as natural philosophy, was introduced into 
the curriculum. 

Thus mathematics, astronomy, and physics have 
been represented in colleges and universities from 
their very beginnings, and even to this day they 
occupy in many institutions a more secure and 
more honorable position than is accorded to the 
newer sciences of chemistry, geology, and biology. 

59 



60 EDWIN G. CONKLIN 

The quality of learning is not strained. The 
spirit of real scholarship is broad and eclectic and 
great scholars in all ages from Aristotle to those 
who sit on this platform have had the open mind, 
the sympathetic heart, the helping hand for all 
branches of human learning. But the great growth 
of sciences and of industries based upon them and 
the great demand for technical education which 
characterized the past century has caused many 
persons to fear that liberal learning is endangered. 
And so there has grown up a conflict between those 
who represent the older system and those who ad- 
vocate the new over the place of the physical and 
natural sciences in institutions of liberal learning. 

The agitation for the introduction of the sci- 
ences of chemistry, geology, and biology Into our 
colleges and universities, and for the teaching of 
all sciences by the laboratory method rather than 
by lectures and demonstrations, began in force 
about the middle of the nineteenth century. Up 
to that time chemistry was rather a subject with 
which to amaze the spectator than a serious study 
to instruct the student, while geology and espe- 
cially biology were more frequently taught as 
branches of natural theology than as natural 
sciences. 

In 1848, in an old frame building on the Charles 
River in Cambridge, Louis Agassiz opened the first 
scientific laboratory in America for the instruction 



THE PLACE OF SCIENCES 61 

of students by the laboratory method. His labora- 
tory of zoology thus antedated all other teaching 
laboratories in this country. But although Agas- 
siz taught zoology from a scientific point of view- 
it was still generally regarded as a part of 
natural theology. At a time when laboratory in- 
struction required justification and popular sup- 
port he said, " The laboratory is to me a sanctu- 
ary ; I would have nothing done in it unworthy of 
the great Author," — truly a noble and beautiful 
sentiment, but an evidence that science was still 
looked upon as a handmaid of religion rather 
than as an independent subject of teaching and 
research. 

And it was against this very conception of sci- 
ence as a subject worthy of study for its own sake, 
and worthy of a place in the college curriculum 
because of its cultural value, that the representa- 
tives of the older systems of education objected 
most strenuously. Mathematics and physics had 
long occupied an unquestioned position in the cur- 
riculum, but the newer sciences seemed to many 
purists in education to be less pure than the older 
ones. And no doubt many scientists went too far 
in the condemnation of the older systems of educa- 
tion, while many classicists went too far in the con- 
demnation of the new. If advocates of the newer 
learning proclaimed with pride, " We are the peo- 
ple and wisdom was born with us," representatives 



62 EDWIN G. CONKLIN 

of the older learning answered with scorn, " We are 
the people and wisdom will die with us." 

Each of us must be aware of a tendency to 
believe that the experience and training which were 
beneficial for us must be the best possible for others. 
Also we magnify the importance of that which 
we have known by deprecating the value of that 
which we have not known. And it is an interesting 
fact which requires no comment that those persons 
who are most certain that the newer sciences have 
little or no cultural value are always those who 
know little or nothing about them. 

Thus the warfare went on between the scientist 
and the classicist during the latter half of the 
nineteenth century and occasionally echoes of it 
are heard even to this day. But the demand for 
instruction in science comparable to that in other 
fields of learning became too great to be success- 
fully resisted and gradually it was admitted to the 
college curriculum, but, as it were, by the back 
door. The scientific goats were not allowed to 
mingle with the academic sheep, but in the larger 
universities separate scientific schools with sepa- 
rate faculties and student bodies were established, 
such as the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, 
the Shefl^eld Scientific School at Yale, and the 
Green School of Science at Princeton ; while sepa- 
rate scientific courses having diff^erent requirfr- 
ments for entrance and for degrees than in the 



THE PLACE OF SCIENCES 63 

case of the academic courses were organized in 
many other institutions. 

For many years this sharp distinction between 
academic and scientific faculties and students was 
maintained, but gradually this distinction has 
broken down and now the sheep and goats are gen- 
erally indistinguishable except that at Commence- 
ment the former are branded " A. B." and the lat- 
ter " B. S." 



II 



Having thus briefly sketched the historical de- 
velopments by which the physical and natural 
sciences came to have a place in the college cur- 
riculum let us now consider the more fundamental 
question as to whether they ought to be there. The 
physical and natural sciences now form a well- 
recognized and firmly established part of the cur- 
riculum of every higher institution of learning. 
Indeed, in not a few institutions scientific studies 
overshadow all others and we have passed from the 
condition of a generation ago, when science was 
merely tolerated in the curriculum, to one in which 
the question is frequently asked whether we are not 
in danger of losing our classics and humanities. 

What are the net results of all these changes? 
Are we losing In our colleges and universities high 
ideals of scholarship and culture? Is the material 



64 EDWIN G. CONKLIN 

and sordid character of the age, which is fre- 
quently proclaimed and decried, the result of in- 
creased attention to science in the schools? Does 
science appeal largely to the material interests of 
men while leaving untouched their intellectual and 
spiritual interests? Is a scientific education 
synonymous with a technical one, and is it the 
purpose of such education to make technicians 
rather than men? 

I believe that all these questions may be and 
should be answered in the negative; that the cul- 
tivation of the sciences has done more for the 
intellectual than for the material interests of men ; 
and that the natural sciences have rightfully taken 
their place in the curriculum alongside of the 
classics and the humanities as subjects of liberal 
culture. 

No education is liberal which does not introduce 
one to the world's best thought and life. A purely 
classical education and a purely scientific one are 
equally illiberal. A liberal education is broad, 
disciplinary, and useful; it educates head, heart, 
and hand ; it must include literature, science, and 
humanities ; it must fit for contact with the world 
along many lines ; it must help one to find himself 
and to choose his work; it must prepare for the 
largest usefulness and enjoyment. 

One of the slight compensations for the world 
war which is now raging is that we are likely to 



THE PLACE OF SCIENCES 65 

hear less in the future of that much abused word 
" Culture." For half a century it has been a word 
to conjure with, especially in academic circles, but 
it has never had any constant meaning except that 
of self-conscious and rather intolerant superiority. 
As a result, every cult or social group or insti- 
tution or nation has defined the word so as to in- 
clude itself and to exclude the rest of the world. 
Like orthodoxy, which Bishop Warburton said " is 
my doxy, heterodoxy is another man's doxy," so 
culture has been defined as my cult, while all other 
cults are philistinism. In particular the high 
priests of education and the Levites in charge of 
the Ark of Culture have always felt called upon 
to smite the Philistines hip and thigh. 

But however the word culture may have 
been used and abused we all agree that ideally it 
stands for something real and good. It is no ex- 
clusive possession of a single cult. It is no single 
definite object, but a general and rather indefinite 
ideal. There are many kinds of culture, but each 
and all may be regarded from the standpoint of the 
individual or from that of society; the former we 
call education, the latter civilization. Viewed from 
either of these aspects I believe that it can be 
shown that science is one of the most valuable and 
most important forces in modern life. 

Much has been said and written of the debt of 
civilization to the natural sciences, but it is per- 



66 EDWIN G. CONKLIN 

haps impossible for any of us to realize the extent 
of that obligation. No catalogue of the material, 
the intellectual, the moral, and the social changes 
wrought in human society by science and the scien- 
tific method could possibly be complete and none 
could convey any adequate conception of the sum 
total of the debt which mankind owes to science. 
It is no exaggeration to say that the chief differ- 
ences between ancient and modern life are due al- 
most entirely to this one factor. Literature, 
philosophy, and art the ancients had which will 
compare favorably with that of any age, but sci- 
ence they did not have except in its merest begin- 
nings. 

The wonderful material changes wrought by sci- 
ence, such as the developments of steam, electric- 
ity, and great engineering enterprises and the con- 
sequent increase of comforts and enlargement of 
human experience; the remarkable growth of the 
applied sciences of chemistry, physics, biology, and 
geology ; and perhaps most of all the revolutionary 
changes in medicine, surgery, and public health 
which have followed a scientific study of the causes 
and remedies of various diseases, are liable to blind 
us to other great achievements of science, which 
if less material are none the less real and valuable. 

1. First among; all the contributions of science 
to civilization stands the emancipation of man 
from various forms of bondage. Science has to a 



THE PLACE OF SCIENCES 67 

large extent freed civilized man from slavery to 
environment; it has well-nigh annihilated time and 
space, it has levied tribute upon practically the 
whole earth to supply his wants, it has taught him 
how to utilize the great resources of nature, and to 
a large extent it has given into his hands the con- 
trol of his destiny on this planet. 

But the highest service of science to culture has 
been in the emancipation of the mind, in freeing 
men from the bondage of superstition and igno- 
rance, in helping man to know himself. We can 
never fully realize the terrors of a world supposed 
to be inhabited by demons and evil spirits, a world 
in which all natural phenomena were but the ex- 
pressions of the love or hate of preternatural 
beings. But we may gather from history and from 
present-day ignorance and superstition some faint 
idea at least of the ever-present dread, even amidst 
happiness and joy, of those who feared Nature 
because they knew her not, of those to whom the 
heavens were full of omens and the earth of por- 
tents, of those who peopled every shadow with 
ghosts and evil spirits and who saw in all sickness, 
pain, adversity, and calamity the cruel hand of a 
demon or the evil eye of a witch. 

It is frequently assumed that the decline of 
superstition is due to the teachings of religion 
or to the general development of the intellectual 
powers of man, and there is no doubt that to a 



68 EDWIN G. CONKLIN 

certain extent this is true. The general advance 
of the intellect, in so far as it is associated with 
truer views of nature, is unquestionably inimical 
to superstition ; yet the persistence of such a super- 
stition as that concerning witchcraft through 
periods of great religious and intellectual awaken- 
ing, the almost universal belief in it throughout 
the golden age of English Literature, the statutes 
of all European countries against the practice of 
witchcraft, sorcery, and magic, some of which re- 
mained until the beginning of the nineteenth cen- 
tury — all these things show that however religion 
and general intelligence may have curbed its cruel 
and murderous practices, the downfall of this 
superstition could be brought about only by a 
more thorough knowledge of nature. The com- 
mon belief that insanity, epilepsy, and imbecility 
were the results of demoniacal possession neces- 
sarily led, even in enlightened and Christian com- 
munities, to cruel methods of exorcising the de- 
mon, and the final disappearance of this super- 
stition (if it may be said to have disappeared even 
at the present day) is entirely due to a scientific 
study of the diseases in question. 

The same might be said of any one of a hun- 
dred forms of superstition, which like a legion of 
demons hedged about the lives of our ancestors. 
As false interpretations of natural phenomena, 
only truer interpretation could replace them, and 



THE PLACE OF SCIENCES 69 

what centuries of the best literature, philosophy, 
and religion had failed to do science has accom- 
plished. Science is, as Huxley has said, organized 
and trained common sense, and nowhere is this bet- 
ter shown than in its rational, common-sense way 
of interpreting mysterious phenomena. No doubt 
much still remains to be accomplished; the unsci- 
entific world is still full of superstition as to 
natural phenomena, but it is a superstition of a 
less malignant type than that which prevailed be- 
fore the general introduction of the scientific 
method. 

Furthermore the cultivation of the natural sci- 
ences has done more than all other agencies to 
liberate man from slavish regard for authority. 
When all others were appealing to antiquity, the 
Church, the Scriptures, Science appealed to facts. 
She has braved the anathemas of popes and church 
councils, of philosophers and scholars in her search 
for truth; she has freed man from ecclesiastical, 
patristic, even academic bondage ; she has unfet- 
tered the mind, enthroned the reason, taught the 
duty and responsibility of independent thought 
and her message to mankind has ever been the mes- 
sage of enlightenment and liberty, " Ye shall know 
the truth and the truth shall make you free." 

2. But science has not only broken the chains 
of superstition and proclaimed intellectual eman- 
cipation, she has enormously enlarged the field of 



70 EDWIN G. CONKLIN 

thought. She has given men nobler and grander 
conceptions of nature than were ever dreamed of 
before. Contrast the old geocentric theory which 
made the earth the center of all created things 
with the revelations of modern astronomy as to 
the enormous sizes, distances, and velocities of the 
heavenly bodies ; contrast the old view that the 
earth was made about six thousand years ago — 
5,675 last September, to be exact, and in six literal 
days — with the revelations of geology that the 
earth is immeasurably old and that not days but 
millions of years have been consumed in its mak- 
ing; contrast the doctrine of creation, which 
taught that the world and all that therein is re- 
cently and miraculously were launched into exist- 
ence, with the revelations of science that animals 
and plants and the world itself are the result of 
an immensely long process of evolution. As Dar- 
win so beautifully says, " There is grandeur in 
this view of life with its several powers having 
been breathed by the Creator into a few fonns or 
into one, and that whilst this planet has gone 
cycling on according to the first law of gravity, 
from so simple a beginning endless forms most 
beautiful and most wonderful have been and are 
being evolved." There is grandeur in the revela- 
tions of science concerning the whole of nature — 
grandeur not only in the conceptions of immen- 
sity which it discloses, but also of the stability of 



THE PLACE OF SCIENCES 71 

nature. To the man of science, nature does not 
represent the mere caprice of god or devil, to be 
lightly altered for a child's whim. Nature is, as 
Bishop Butler said, that which is stated, fixed, 
settled; eternal process moving on, the same yes- 
terday, to-day, and forever. Men may come and 
men may go, doctrines may rise and disappear, 
states may flourish and decay, but in nature, as 
in God himself, there is neither variableness nor 
shadow of turning. The all too prevalent notion 
that nature may be wheedled, cheated, juggled 
with, shows that men have not yet begun to realize 
the stability of nature and indicates the necessity 
of at least some elementary scientific training for 
all men. " To the solid ground of Nature trusts 
the mind that builds for aye." 

3. Science has changed our whole point of view 
as to nature and man, and science cannot there- 
fore be eliminated from any system of education 
which strives to impart culture. It is not prin- 
cipally nor primarily in its results, however great 
they may be, that the chief service of science is found, 
but rather in its method. In a word the method of 
science is the appeal to phenomena, the appeal to 
nature. To the scientist the test of truth is not 
logic, nor inner conviction, nor conceivability and 
inconceivability, but phenomena or what are com- 
monly called facts. The steps of this appeal to 
phenomena are first observation or experiment ; 



72 EDWIN G. CONKLIN 

then induction, hypothesis, or generalization, and 
finally verification by further observations, experi- 
ments, and comparisons. The methods of science 
have now invaded to a greater or less extent all 
domains of thought, — philosophy, literature, art, 
education, and religion, — and the unique character 
of the method of science may not be fully appre- 
ciated except upon comparison with prescientific 
or non-scientific methods. 

Of course one need not expect to find any proper 
appreciation of the scientific method among the 
ignorant, but it is amazing how such appreciation 
is lacking among many otherwise intelligent and 
cultivated people. We daily see cases where the 
test of truth is the appeal to superstition, to senti- 
ment, to prejudice, to inner conviction, in short 
to anything rather than to facts. The world is 
full of people who know nothing of the value of 
facts or of evidence, whether it be with regard to 
such general themes as religion, education, gov- 
ernment, society, personality, or more special 
ones such as diseases and methods of treating 
them, vaccination, animal experimentation, food 
fads, and the like. 

Consider for a moment the art of healing, as 
contrasted with the science of medicine; the vari- 
ous " schools of medicine " and much more those 
who never went to school appeal not to carefully 
determined, accurately controllable phenomena, but 



THE PLACE OF SCIENCES 73 

largely to sentiment, prejudice, and superstition. 
The same is true of the " fake " science which 
flourishes mightily in the daily papers, and espe- 
cially is it shown in the hypotheses, discoveries, 
and dogmas of those who determine the laws of 
nature from introspection and construct the uni- 
verse from their inner consciousness. 

Every little while there arises a new and bril- 
liant Lucifer who draws after him a third part of 
the hosts of heaven. Though he appears under 
many guises, such as Divine Healer, Christian Sci- 
entist (Heaven save the mark!). Spiritualist, The- 
osophist, Telepathist, the main tenet of his belief is 
always the same, — a revolt against the scientific 
method of appealing to phenomena. 

One of the hardest lessons of life is to learn to 
see things as they are. We tend by nature to put 
ourselves into everything we interpret. We see 
things not as they are but embroidered round and 
covered over by our fear or love or hate. Our 
emotions blind our judgments and not Infre- 
quently reduce us to the level of irrational beings. 
There are thousands of intelligent men and women, 
among them many graduates of colleges and uni- 
versities, whose opinions regarding the most im- 
portant questions of their lives are shaped by 
sentiment and prejudice and convention rather 
than by a study of facts. And it is this which 
makes possible blind loyalty whether to college or 



74 EDWIN G. CONKLIN 

party or church, and bhnd prejudice and hatred 
between classes and races and nations ; it is this 
which arouses war and destroys the monuments 
of civilization. It is this refusal to see things as 
they are that destroys character and peace and 
progress. 

What is the remedy for such a state of affairs? 
What can be done by our colleges and schools to 
improve this really dreadful condition? How 
can individuals be taught the value of facts? 
There is probably no better way than by incul- 
cating the methods of science, by the first-hand 
appeal to phenomena. The appeal to facts is the 
very foundation of science, and it is a method in 
which every person should receive thorough and 
systematic training. Even this will fail in many 
cases where inherited tendencies are too strong 
to be overcome by training, but at least it will 
help to promote a spirit of open-mindedness, sin- 
cerity, and sanity. 

To me it seems that there is no part of an 
education so important as this, none the lack of 
which will so seriously mar the whole life. Of 
course it is not claimed that all scientists best 
illustrate the scientific method nor that it may not 
be practiced by those who have not studied sci- 
ence, but that this method is best inculcated in 
the study of the natural sciences. Science not 
only appeals to facts, but it cultivates a love of 



THE PLACE OF SCIENCES 75 

truth, not merely of the sentimental sort, but such 
as leads men to long-continued and laborious re- 
search; it trains the critical judgment as to evi- 
dence ; it gives man truer views of himself and of 
the world in which he lives, and it therefore fur- 
nishes, as I believe, the best possible foundation 
not only for scholarship in any field, but for citi- 
zenship and general culture. 

But culture is not some definite goal to be 
reached by a single kind of discipline. There is 
no single path to culture and the great danger 
which confronts the student of the natural sciences 
is that his absorption in his work may lead to a 
narrowness which blinds him to the larger sig- 
nificance of the facts with which he deals and unfits 
him for association with his fellow-men. A techni- 
cal education which deals only with training for 
special work without reference to foundation prin- 
ciples may be useful and necessary but it cannot 
be said to contribute largely to culture. What 
teacher has not been surprised and pained by the 
fear which some students exhibit that they may 
waste an hour on some subject the direct financial 
value of which they do not see, — students who 
fail to grasp general principles, to take a broad 
and generous view of life, to appreciate good work 
wherever done? The scientist no less than the 
classicist or the humanist should know the world's 
best thought and life. Life is not only Jcnouing 



76 EDWIN G. CONKLIN 

but feeling and doing also, and other things than 
science are necessary to culture. The day is for- 
ever past when any one mind can master all sci- 
ences, much less all knowledge ; there can never be 
another Aristotle or Humboldt ; nevertheless in the 
demand for broad and liberal training the greatest 
needs of scientific work and the highest ideals of 
culture are at one, and this Institution can serve 
no more useful purpose than to stand in the future, 
as it has done in the past, for the highest, broad- 
est, and most generous views of learning and of 
life. 



THE COLLEGE AS A PREPARA- 
TION FOR PROFESSIONAL 
STUDY 

PRESIDENT RUSH RHEES 

We are constantly reminded of the fact that 
modern higher education is the outgrowth of a 
medieval demand for more thorough training for 
professional careers — in theology, in law, in medi- 
cine, and in teaching. And it is true that the 
foremost of the medieval universities gained dis- 
tinction as schools for training for one or others 
of these professions — Bologna for law both civil 
and canon, Salerno for medicine, Paris and in 
large measure the ancient English universities for 
theology — while all of these maintained faculties 
of arts, whose masters became the teaching guild 
for all of Christian Europe. 

It cannot be regarded as accident, however, but 
as a conclusion from experience, that in most of 
those universities the faculty of arts early came 
to be more than a colleague or rival of the other 
faculties. It soon developed into an ally of the 
others, and, particularly in the English univer- 
sities, the primate among them. The courses 

77 



78 RUSH RHEES 

of study for theology and law early recognized 
the value of a prior training of their students under 
the faculty of arts ; and special concessions were 
made in the time required for degrees in the case 
of students who enrolled under these faculties 
after being graduated in arts. 

Nor can it be truly deemed accidental that, 
when the colonists in New England and Virginia 
made the first beginnings of higher education in 
America, with the avowed purpose of training 
youth for the ministry, for law, for medicine, 
and for public service, they planted in the wilder- 
ness not schools of theology or medicine or law, 
but modest copies of the English colleges in 
which their founders had gained their own train- 
ing in general liberal culture. 

In accordance with the precedents with which 
the founders of Harvard and Yale were familiar 
in their English college life, and for the further- 
ance of the primary purpose which actuated the 
founding of those first New England colleges, 
chairs of divinity were indeed established in Har- 
vard in 1638 and in Yale in 1741. In 1755 the 
charter of Kings College (now Columbia) pro- 
vided for a professorship of divinity, but no ap- 
pointment was ever made. During all the colonial 
period, however, practical preparation for the min- 
istry was for the most part obtained by means of 
the instruction and example furnished to aspirants 



PREPARATION FOR PROFESSIONS 79 

for the ministry by leaders in that profession, 
who took the young theologues into their homes 
and churches as virtual apprentices. A similar 
apprenticeship system was relied upon for the 
training of physicians and lawyers. In the ex- 
igencies of their pioneer life the founders of our 
American colleges selected instinctively the school 
of liberal culture as the indispensable factor 
in higher education, and left to a later time 
the development of schools for professional 
training. 

Not until the closing years of the colonial 
period did that development make its appearance. 

As early as 1750 lectures on anatomy were 
given in Philadelphia by Dr. Thomas Cadwallader, 
and in 1765 Dr. John Morgan and Dr. William 
Shippen, Jr., founded a school of medicine in that 
city, which was attached to the College of Phila- 
delphia, now the University of Pennsylvania. In 
1763 the governors of Kings College in New York 
voted to provide instruction in medicine as soon as 
funds could be procured, and in 1767 a Medical 
School was established with six professors, the first 
medical degrees being awarded to two graduates 
in 1769. The Harvard Medical School was 
founded in 1782. Since that time the growth of 
schools of medicine in our country has been abun- 
dant if not appalling. 

The first school organized to give instruction in 



80 RUSH RHEES 

law was founded bj Topping Reeve in Litchfield, 
Connecticut, in 1784, and it flourished for many 
years, graduating over a thousand students. In 
1792 a chair of law in Columbia College was 
created, and in 1793 James Kent was chosen to fill 
it. He held the post until 1798, when through fail- 
ure of the legislative grant which had provided 
the salary the chair was discontinued. 

In 1823, however, Kent again became professor 
of law in Columbia College, and held the post 
until his death in 1847. The Harvard Law School 
dates from 1820, though its vigorous life did not 
show itself until 1830. 

The year 1784 saw the establishment of the first 
Theological Seminary in America — that of the 
Dutch Reformed Church, in New Brunswick, New 
Jersey. Since that time many schools for minis- 
terial education have been founded, and more of 
them have been independent of affiliation with col- 
leges or universities than have had such academic 
connections. 

The modern developments of applied science 
have brought into being many very strong schools 
for training in various branches of engineer- 
ing, a development prophetically foreseen in the 
later years of the eighteenth century, but essen- 
tially a nineteenth-century growth. Even more re- 
cent is the development, now progressing rapidly, 
of special colleges for the training of teachers, 



PREPARATION FOR PROFESSIONS 81 

to which many students resort who have first gained 
a bachelor's degree in arts or science. 

I have oflPered this cursory sketch simply to re- 
mind you of the relative lateness, as well as of the 
recent luxuriousness, of the growth of institutions 
for distinctly professional education. 

I now desire to call attention to an interesting 
feature of that development. Many of the schools 
for theology, medicine, and law which appeared 
during the nineteenth century not only had no 
connection with any faculty of arts or liberal cul- 
ture, but made hesitating if any demand for col- 
lege training as prerequisite for admission to the 
professional courses. 

This attitude of independence or indifference 
found some historical justification in the practical 
parity of the faculties of theology, medicine, and 
law with the faculty of arts in the typical medie- 
val universities, and it characterized until quite 
recent times the attitude and practice of most of 
the professional faculties which were developed by 
our older colleges in the course of the development 
of a genuine university organization. Not only 
so, but a singular inconsistency sometimes ap- 
peared, namely a readiness on the part of pro- 
fessional faculties In our emerging universities to 
receive students in their classes with less rigid 
scrutiny of their preliminary education than the 
college — or arts — faculty were exercising. 



88 RUSH RHEES 

Recent years, however, have seen two note- 
worthy developments in professional education in 
America : A very great broadening of the concep- 
tion of professional education, which has given 
to the work of these schools a more generally 
scientific, as distinguished from a narrow voca- 
tional or technical, character; and a decided stiff- 
ening of requirements for preliminary education 
both in extent and in quality. The former of 
these tendencies is a natural consequence of a 
higher conception of the importance of the sci- 
entific basis for professional competency, and a 
more alert academic conscience. It has brought 
about a marked increase in the personnel of the 
force of instruction essential to the maintenance 
of such professional schools, a growing demand 
that incumbents of professorships in such schools 
be acknowledged leaders in the scientific aspects 
of their specialties, and that they be men who are 
willing to make teaching their vocation, not simply 
their avocation. This recent development has also 
involved a great increase in the extent and costli- 
ness of the equipment for professional education. 
As a consequence there appears a strong tend- 
ency to concentrate effort for the betterment 
of teaching in theology, law, and medicine 
upon schools which are organized as depart- 
ments of strong universities, or may become such 
by affiliation. 



PREPARATION FOR PROFESSIONS 83 

The tendency to increasing vigor in the defini- 
tion and administration of entrance requirements 
shows two aspects which are of great interest to 
the American college. There is on the one hand a 
slowly growing demand for a bachelor's degree, or 
its clear equivalent, as a condition of admission to 
some of the leading professional schools. And 
where this rigid requirement is not enforced, there 
appears in its place a requirement of the successful 
completion of one, two, or three years of the cus- 
tomary college course.' 

Herein we see a revival of the preference granted 
to Masters of Arts by the faculties of theology 
and law in several of the medieval universities, 
or a desire to put admission to American univer- 
sity schools of law and medicine on a basis equiva- 
lent to that furnished by the completion of the 
course of study in a German gymnasium or a 
French lycee. 

On the other hand there appears to be growing, 
especially in the demands of faculties of medi- 
cine, a tendency to push back into the college 
course something of the narrowness of profes- 
sional outlook and interest which belongs of neces- 
sity to the professional school. 

Now, what meaning have these developments for 
the American college? On the one hand the 
growth of professional schools in equipment of 
men and material facilities, and in scientific thor- 



84 RUSH RHEES 

oughness, which is placing them in the plane of 
worthy constituent membership in a group of uni- 
versity faculties, seems to not a few to point to a 
coming readjustment of American education, in 
which the old-time college, which served well the 
needs of our pioneer life, shall give way for a 
more modem adjustment of secondary to higher 
education. On the other hand the tendency on 
the part of several of our most richly endowed 
and equipped professional faculties to declare 
that their superior service is to be reserved 
for a select class of students, who qualify for 
the privilege by obtaining first a bachelor's 
degree, gives a notable testimony to the value 
which leaders in professional education place 
upon the effects of a thorough course in liberal 
culture. 

Let me call attention at this point to the essen- 
tial features of college education as we in America 
have developed it. The American college either by 
the invitation of attractive opportunity for elec- 
tion, or more commonly by a more or less definite 
prescription of studies, opens for its students doors 
of outlook upon many different sides of life and 
phases of truth. The college degree presupposes 
that its holder has gained some acquaintance with 
at least several of the great departments of col- 
lege instruction : namely, foreign languages ; the 
mathematical, natural, and physical sciences — both 



PREPARATION FOR PROFESSIONS 85 

as to facts and as to scientific method ; the history 
of the political development which has given us our 
institutions ; economic and social science ; philos- 
ophy — the endeavor of the human mind to appre- 
hend somewhat of the meaning of existence ; and 
literature — the record of the high creative attain- 
ments of human thought and insight. No student 
is likely to have entered upon all these branches 
of study, every graduate has given his attention 
to several of them. 

Now each one of these branches of college study 
appeals to a different sort of intellectual interest, 
and awakens a different kind of intellectual alert- 
ness ; and as studied in college each introduces the 
student to the value and delight of learning, quite 
apart from any consideration of the subsequent 
utility of the subject-matter of the studies pur- 
sued. I 
Obviously it is important that the years spent 
on the study of Greek or Latin or German or 
French should endow the student with the ability 
to use these foreign tongues for reading or con- 
versation. But even more significant than that 
ability is the experience which the study of for- 
eign languages gives of the understanding of ideas 
unfamiliar to the student's thought, expressed in 
words and constructions strange to his mind, which 
picture conditions of life and ideals of conduct 
and endeavor quite foreign to his experience. 



86 RUSH RHEES 

This study stretches the boundaries of his under- 
standing and sympathy, and begets in him, if it 
succeeds with him at all, a power of intellectual ad- 
justment to unanticipated conditions and ideas, 
and a power of appreciation for truth appearing 
in strange garb, that not only enrich the man's life, 
but immensely enlarge his ability to be of use in 
dealing with other men. For, after all, the great 
task of human fellowship in work and in social re- 
lations is the task of translation. The greatest 
need of my life of human intercourse is ability to 
understand what another man means who does not 
think in my way or speak with my shibboleths, 
and ability to express my thought in terms 
that will convey and not obscure it to another 
mind. 

Similarly the study of science and of history 
enlarges the borders of a man's life, and deepens 
the wells of his understanding, quite in addition 
to the mastery he may gain of the facts and 
hypotheses and methods of any particular science, 
or the familiarity his study may give him with the 
story of any given people or period of history. 
And such broadening increases rapidly with each 
additional science or historical epoch with which 
the student gains acquaintance. 

Quite different and more deepening is the en- 
largement which comes to the mind with the pur- 
suit of philosophical inquiry and the study of the 



PREPARATION FOR PROFESSIONS 87 

history of human thought. While the man who 
enters the treasure house of literature, and makes 
friends with the great minds of the ages, has en- 
riched his life with enduring wealth of intellectual 
comradeship, and has also risen to a higher out- 
look upon life and all its concerns, whence he 
can see things in more just proportions, and 
judge questions with more equitable judgment, 
than is possible for the man of rigid professional 
training. 

It is not only impossible, but it is undesirable 
that any man should be asked to gain for himself 
each one of these varied enlargements of life ; for 
the effort would frustrate itself by substituting 
superficial intellectual indulgence for serious in- 
tellectual work. But the significance of college 
training lies in the fact that these avenues of 
interest and human enlargement are opened to the 
college student, that each man of necessity enters 
upon two or more of them, and that in each one 
of them he follows a path that leads him to a 
larger knowledge of truth, without conscious con- 
cern for the practical uses of that truth. 

I say without conscious concern for the practical 
uses of that truth. For with the amazing de- 
velopment of the applications of science and all 
learning to the practical problems of our modem 
life there are few branches of intellectual inquiry 
that do not contribute greatly to some practical 



88 RUSH RHEES 

undertakings which men follow as vocations. The 
study of chemistry and biology in college may 
be, and should be, directly serviceable to gradu- 
ates who enter medical schools. The college 
studies of history and philosophy may be, and 
should be, directly serviceable to men who go for- 
ward to prepare for the ministry or the law. But 
there is importance in the detachment from con- 
cern with practical uses which characterizes the 
college man's pursuit of learning. That detach- 
ment constitutes one of the most valuable items 
in his education, one of the most effective influ- 
ences for intellectual breadth and intellectual sym- 
pathy. For it carries his thought out to interests 
and realities that are beyond and above his own 
life, and furnishes a wide horizon in which to see 
the relations and proportions of his more personal 
undertakings and concerns. 

This brings me to the essence of the subject 
which has been assigned to me, and gives oppor- 
tunity for avowal of my faith in the present and 
future value of the American college. 

I believe that the American college contributes 
to preparation for professional study an influence 
for intellectual maturity which no other agency 
has to off'er. By intellectual maturity I do not 
mean simply developed intellectual power, for pro- 
fessional studies as at present conducted have no 
superior in that respect. I mean by intellectual 



PREPARATION FOR PROFESSIONS 89 

maturity a well-balanced judgment, a sense of pro- 
portion in the estimate of truth, and ability to 
see facts in larger and more remote as well as in 
nearer and obvious relations. It is a maturity 
like that which a man gains from travel in foreign 
lands, like that which the varied experiences of 
city life bring to the man country bred. It depends 
on ability to see particular truths from the vantage 
point of a wide outlook, and to estimate them with 
the broad sympathy of understanding which is be- 
gotten by interest in other phases of truth. 

Such breadth of outlook and sympathy of under- 
standing come to the student of theology or law 
who knows something of the facts and methods of 
natural or physical science. They are given to a 
student of medicine or engineering by some knowl- 
edge of literature and some understanding of 
philosophy and philosophic method. 

College education cannot guarantee that intel- 
lectual maturity will be found in all wearers of 
college degrees — for some students never get their 
blinders off, so as to see truths in wide relations. 
But college education offers the most promising 
means for such intellectual emancipation. There- 
fore I hold it to be a peculiarly important and valu- 
able preparation for professional study. 

This service cannot be so well rendered by an ex- 
tension of the secondary school, after the pattern 
of the German or French practice. The medieval 



90 RUSH RHEES 

course in arts was not a preparatory school, 
though its value as a preparation for work 
under other faculties was early recognized. The 
independence of interest, the detachment of en- 
deavor, which belong to the best college work, con- 
tribute in essential ways to the maturing influences 
which give college study its value as a prepara- 
tion for later professional courses. If I mistake 
not, herein lies part of the secret of the peculiar 
sanity, the balance of judgment, and the sense of 
proportion which characterize English scholarship, 
even when in laborious mastery of details and in 
Wealth of erudition it falls short of German and 
French attainments. I am convinced that for our 
future good the emphasis we have placed on studies 
for liberal culture in the atmosphere of an insti- 
tution of higher learning, borrowing our practices 
from England, should be strengthened, and not 
abandoned. 

Another contribution which college education 
makes to preparation for professional study is 
corollary to this maturity of mind to which I have 
just alluded. Let me call it a developed intellectual 
instinct against rash generalizations and against 
over-confident logical conclusions. I shall doubt- 
less lay myself open to charge of transgressing 
my own law, if I confess that I know of no more 
misleading influence in our intellectual life than 
logic. That generalization is rash. Its justifica- 



PREPARATION FOR PROFESSIONS 91 

tion lies in the fact that it challenges consideration, 
critical, modest, and teachable, of the premises of 
which impeccable logical procedure makes use. I 
know nothing more pathetic than the dogmatic de- 
liverances of metaphysical theologians concerning 
what can be true in the world of nature, except- 
ing the dogmatic assertions of men of science who 
wander into philosophy's domain and seem wholly 
unaware that in that strange field their impressions 
and speculations have lost all the authority that of 
right inhered in their scientific observations and 
inductions therefrom. We have heard and seen 
much these recent months of the so-called biological 
defense of war. The tragedy of that argument is 
its false analogy, its blindness to what fitness and 
progress have come to mean in the unfolding of 
human history. The sensitive intellectual con- 
science, quick to discern such fallacies, and repudi- 
ate premises which issue in false conclusions, is 
bred by such varied studies and such detached 
interests as the college of liberal culture offers to 
its students. 

Another value of college training as a prepara- 
tion for professional study I find in that facility 
of translation to which I have already referred as 
one of the most essential qualities of the broadly 
educated man. It is needless that I enlarge fur- 
ther upon it; enough to call to mind the growing 
importance, with the increase of men practicing 



92 RUSH RHEES 

our varied professions, of ability on the part of 
leaders in professional life to convince and lead 
what I may call " lay " opinion. Experience has 
demonstrated that that power of translation, of 
expressing new truth in familiar terms, is one of 
the natural products of college education. 

One other contribution is indirect rather than 
obvious, and it is even more broadly human and 
less professionally significant in its value than 
either the maturity of mind or the sensitive intellec- 
tual conscience, or the power of translation to 
which I had just called attention. I mean the 
resources for richer intellectual living which a man 
acquires when he has traveled far enough and 
widely enough in the world of the mind to be at 
home in different places and with different inter- 
ests, and when he has entered somewhat into the 
fellowship of great thoughts and great lives of 
other times and other climes. 

In conclusion, let me reaffirm my belief that how- 
ever much of accident due to pioneer conditions 
may have entered into the origins of our American 
colleges, the riper development of our intellectual 
life is to come to our country by nourishing, by 
cultivating, by pruning if need be, and by guiding 
the work of the American college, so that the 
unique service which can be rendered to national 
wisdom and national power by the matured mind 
and judgment of men who have pursued truth with 



PREPARATION FOR PROFESSIONS 93 

some detachment from every consideration but the 
love of it may be the privilege of the coming gen- 
erations, as it has been of that which is now join- 
ing here in celebration of a century of fidelity to 
its ideals by an American college. 



THE COLLEGE AS A PREPARA- 
TION FOR PRACTICAL AFFAIRS 

PRESIDENT CHARLES F. THWING 

And what are practical affairs? What are the 
forces, the movements, the concerns which we call 
practical? The practical represents those powers 
often called utilities, which are embodied in ma- 
terial forms, or which represent those forms. The 
practical is a force which makes its appeal to the 
eye, to the ear, to the touch. The non-practical 
may seem to make its appeal to the eye, as 
Raphael's Madonna or a Greek marble, or to the 
ear, as a noble piece of music, but these make their 
appeal through the outer organ to the inner sense 
or sensibilities. The practical finds its supreme 
achievement in a material civilization. Its stand- 
ards are scales and yardsticks ; its results are 
embodied in tons, square feet, and cubic yards. 
Its ends are primarily quantitative. Its atmos- 
pheres are the lust of the flesh, the lust of the 
eyes, and the pride of life. At its highest its re- 
sults are seen in the center of the metropolis, as, 
for instance, of that part of London known as 
the Bank, a microcosm of the forces of the world. 

95 



^ CHARLES F. THWING 

At its worst its results are seen in the selfishness 
and the sensualism of a mind disintegrated, of a 
conscience corrupted, of a will weak for right and 
strong for wrong. This microcosm may apply to 
the individual or to the community, as seen in the 
court of Louis XV. 

The practical man is the man who has an eye 
for the main chance, who casts an anchor to the 
windward, who seeks to be safe, who avoids risks, 
who likes comfort. He may believe in education, 
but if he does, he believes in it chiefly because edu- 
cation helps him to make more rather than to be- 
come more; who, if he believes in the church, be- 
lieves in it for this world and not for other- 
worldliness; who wishes the community to be well 
housed and properly fed ; and who would improve 
humanity by comforts and by material forces 
rather than by ideas. This man has imagination, 
but it seldom rises above the fifth story of the five 
senses, and sometimes not above the " third story 
back." He has no sky, no horizon, no " intima- 
tions of immortality," either in life's prose or life's 
verse. He may read poetry, but it is rather Walt 
Whitman than Wordsworth. He hears no sky- 
larks, he sees no Grecian urns, he has no vision 
from peaks of Darien. 

The college has nothing to do with practical 
concerns, says one. It is utterly remote from 
such mundane considerations and relationships. 



PREPARATION FOR AFFAIRS 97 

The college is a monastery placed far away from 
the world. The college is a pliilosophy like Hegel's, 
which is said to be a system shot out of pure space. 
The college buildings should be put either on Mt. 
Sinai peak or in an African desert. Its chief in- 
habitant should be Browning's Grammarian. 

Such is the interpretation of one who believes 
that the college has no relations at all with prac- 
tical concerns. The college should be unpractical. 
It should embody what a great teacher of mathe- 
matics is said to have said upon writing a formula 
upon the blackboard : " Thank heaven that can 
be put to no use ! " The unpractical man, in con- 
tinuation of the type of the unpractical college, 
is he who fails to adjust ideals to forces, who 
declines to relate causes to effects, or effects to 
causes, or conditions to conclusions, either re- 
mote or immediate. 

In these two interpretations so unlike, so almost 
contradictory, wherein lies the truth? As often 
happens, the truth does lie in the mean, not only 
as executive strength, but also as veracity. The 
college has to recognize that man is a citizen of two 
hemispheres, the material, the visible, the audible, the 
tangible ; the immaterial, the invisible, the inaudible, 
the intangible. He is not so much a contradiction, 
as Pascal says, as he is a union of opposites. He 
is, indeed, as Pascal does intimate, somewhat akin 
to the brutes, but he also is somewhat akin to 



98 CHARLES F. THWING 

the angels. He is the subject of greatness and the 
victim of baseness. He may be a reed, the weakest 
in nature, but he is a reed that thinks. If he in- 
habit one hemisphere alone, he is only one-half a 
man. By living in both he becomes the whole, 
the spherical man. 

It is of course acknowledged that what we call the 
purely intellectual hemisphere the college should 
train. The college should do for man to-day what 
Socrates did for Plato and Plato for his disciples. 
It is to adopt and to use the Athenian, and not the 
Spartan, type of education. It is to give acquaint- 
ance with the truths of life; to orient the student 
into a world of citizenship ; to lead one back into 
the sources of civilization, and from those sources 
to create resources ; to help one to discern and to 
direct the tendencies of which he is a part, and 
always and everywhere to create life in his own 
bosom. It is to develop the non-material, the 
spiritual elements of the community and of the 
person. 

But it is also — and right here is the crux of our 
problem — to seek to discipline that part of the 
material hemisphere of man which lies closest and 
nearest to the non-material. On this material side 
it is to accomplish five results : first, it is to teach 
one to think, to think clearly; second, to teach 
one to appreciate, to appreciate sympathetically; 
third, to teach one to apply truth, to apply truth 



PREPARATION FOR AFFAIRS 99 

usefully ; fourth, to teach one to work, and to work 
thoroughly; and fifth, to teach one to enjoy, and 
to enjoy fully. 

First, to teach one to think, and to think clearly. 
To think is the most precious intellectual result of 
the college. Thinking is an art. It is, of course, also 
a science. But for the college man it is primarily 
an art. An art is learned by practicing it. Think- 
ing is, therefore, learned by thinking. It repre- 
sents habits of intellectual accuracy, discrimina- 
tion, comparison, concentration. Such habits are 
formed by being accurate, discriminating, and by 
the actual concentration of the mind. A course 
in education promotes such thinking better than 
a course in business. For education represents 
orderliness and system in intellectual effort. The 
effort proceeds by certain graduated steps, from 
the easy to the less easy, from the difficult to the 
more difficult. The purpose is to train in the 
valuation of principles, which underlie all service, 
and not in the worth of rules, which are of special 
and narrow application. The man trained only in 
business of one kind is not fitted to take up business 
of a different kind. The broadly trained man is 
prepared to learn business of any kind, and if busi- 
ness of one kind has been learned, he is able to 
leave it to take up work of another kind without 
difficulty. The practice of any art should make 
the one who practices this art a better thinker 



100 CHARLES F. THWING 

in it ; but this advantage relates in a large degree 
to one who has first approached the art through 
thinking. 

I suppose it may be said that the man who is 
self-educated is usually very narrowly educated. 
He is educated along and in certain lines. He is 
educated, so to speak, tangentially. His thinking, 
too, is usually tangential. It lacks comprehensive- 
ness and a sense of relations. It has force, and the 
endeavors which spring out of it are forceful ; but 
breadth is sacrificed. To do away with such 
tangential education is the purpose of the college. 
Education should be made a curve. It should 
possess symmetry. The college represents a fine 
communal force which best draws that curve. 
Tangents are individual. 

Also, on the material side, college is to teach 
one to appreciate sympathetically. Provincialism 
is, despite our so-called cosmopolitanism, one of 
the curses of modem life. Our cosmopolitanism is 
often merely superficial. The college is to teach 
this semi-materialistic man and provincial that 
there is a spiritual world above what he sees and 
hears. It is to bring him into relationship with 
every side of life's polygon. It is to help him to 
become a citizen of the world and to be properly 
at home in any society. 

Third, the college on the material side is also 
to help each man to apply the truths he receives, 



PREPARATION FOR AFFAIRS 101 

the powers which he represents, usefully unto the 
highest. One does not forget that one of the great- 
est of modern scientists was Lord Kehdn. A pure 
scientist he was, but every telegram which goes 
under the sea bears in essence the power of Kelvin, 
and every ship sailing the seas sails it more safely 
by reason of Kelvin's compass. 

College men of liberal training have founded the 
United States Geographical Survey, the Weather 
Bureau, and many agricultural and experimental 
stations. Let it be not forgotten that Eli Whit- 
ney, the inventor of the cotton gin, was a graduate 
of Yale College of the Class of 1792, and that 
Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the electric tel- 
egraph, was also a graduate, eighteen years after. 

Fourth, education, on its material side, is to 
teach one to work and to work thoroughly. It is 
as popular as it is, I fear, honest to declaim 
against our mechanical looseness and slackness. In 
every building, we know that the hidden founda- 
tions do not go deep enough, that sand takes the 
place of cement, putty of lead in the plumbing, 
weak wooden beams for iron girders, cotton for 
wool, and canvas for leather in the furnishing. We 
know that too many workmen seek to give the 
least labor for the most pay. The close of the 
eight-hour day finds the laborer with overalls off 
and coat on, ready to go home. Now in all prac- 
tical concerns education should teach a man to 



102 CHARLES F. THWING 

give an equivalent for what he receives. Educa- 
tion teaches him that in practical concerns, to 
be honest in his service, to be no shirk, to seek 
for every man's rights and his own duties, as well 
as for the other man's duties and his own rights, 
to be a workman so just, so careful, so considerate, 
so thorough, that even the gods may approve of 
his handicraft. The college should be a hard task- 
master in order to train its man to serve and to 
live as ever in his " great taskmaster's eye." 

Fifth, on the material side also, the college is to 
train the student to enjoy life fully, thoroughly, 
to enter into all cubical relationships of the length, 
the depth, the height of being. The college should 
train this man to find delight in the oratorio, and 
not to limit his pleasure to rag-time, or to " It's 
a Long Way to Tipperary." It should help him 
to find satisfaction in an art museum, and not to 
teach him that the pictorial art does not go beyond 
the " movies." It should help this graduate to have 
resources in books and not to be obliged to build 
a laboratory in his cellar to escape nocturnal dull- 
ness. It should help this business man, manufac- 
turer, merchant, chemist, banker, farmer, to see 
the infinite relations of his work, to feel its poetry, 
to be stirred by its imaginations. 

If the college on its material side can give these 
great teachings, — to think clearly, to appreciate 
sympathetically, to apply usefully to work thor- 



PREPARATION FOR AFFAIRS 103 

oughlj, to enjoy beautifully, — it has done much, 
very much, to enlarge, to deepen, to heighten, to 
enrich, to strengthen, life's practical concerns. 

The four qualities most needed in practical con- 
cerns one might say are judgment, energy, tact, 
patience. They are the foundation on which the 
four-square house of business is built. The college 
helps to construct each of these walls. It builds 
the wall of judgment, for it trains one to see, to 
discriminate, to relate, to infer. It builds the wall 
of energy, for it creates and it conserves strength, 
enlarges resources, dissipates fear, and enriches 
power. It builds the wall of tact, for it trains the 
gentleman. It builds the wall of patience, for it 
lifts the heart away from the impact of to-day 
onto the appreciation of yesterday and the vision 
of to-morrow. 

I In a word, I would have this graduate in a ma- 
terialistic age serve that age by being an idealistic 
materialist. In a merchandise age I would have 
him serve his age as an idealistic merchant. In an 
industrial age I would have him serve his age by 
being an idealistic industrialist. In an age of 
steel I would have him put the strength, the flexi- 
bility, the adaptiveness of steel into his mind, the 
coolness of steel into his eye to see truth justly, 
the heat of steel into his heart to feel warmly for 
all men, and the power of steel into his whole char- 
acter, that he may give strength unto all. 



THE PRESENT STATUS AND 

PROBABLE FUTURE OF THE 

COLLEGE IN THE EAST 

PRESIDENT JOHN H. FINLEY 

The great president of a great university in 
the East, whom you are to have the good fortune 
to hear to-night, spoke a few days ago with dis- 
paragement of the industry of a Latin student who 
had found that the conjunction " et " was used by 
Virgil in the ^neid 5,932 times (as I recall), and 
of the thesis of a New York candidate for the 
doctor's degree who discussed the interjections 
(nineteen in number) which appear in certain 
poems of Terence. With such an admonitory 
word concerning meticulous scholarship fresh in 
mind, I dare not undertake to note the permuta- 
tions of the entrance requirements of the Eastern 
colleges, nor attempt to record the ephemeris of 
their curricula in the northern heavens, where fair 
Harvard sits like Cassiopeia in her eternal chair, 
where the six binary Pleiads of Columbia shine, 
and where Amherst glows like Capella with a 
spectrum which, it is claimed by some, most closely 
resembles that of the sun of our daily existence, 
105 



106 JOHN H. FINLEY 

and is thought by others to resemble Capella only 
in the respect that the light of that star is forty 
years in reaching our planet. 

Yet I realize that it is only such meticulous 
studies of the stars in the academic skies which 
will enable us to make any accurate prophecy, that 
is, enable us to determine the ephemeris of to- 
morrow. 

We are informed by astronomers that there is 
a clearly discernible movement on the part of the 
stars of heaven, a " star-drift " towards a certain 
star ; as I recall, a star in the constellation of Canis 
Major. That is the supreme ultimate fact of the 
physical universe. And by analogy what is really 
of concern to us is not as to just what positions 
the several colleges in the northeastern heavens 
hold to-day or will hold to-morrow, but as to the 
direction in which they are moving, as to what is 
the universal and ultimate goal of their move- 
ment. 

We seek the Canis Major, that is, the " place of 
understanding," the ultimate. We wish to know 
its azimuth and right ascension, or, better, its 
terrestrial latitude and longitude. 

Job sought it, saying: " Surely there is a vein 
for silver and a place for gold where they find it " ; 
and after giving poetic intimations of courses in 
meteorology, geology, chemistry, physical geog- 
raphy, and engineering, which led towards it, he 



THE COLLEGE IN THE EAST 107 

asks In tired refrain : " But where is the home of 
wisdom and where is the place of understanding? " 

Man, he added, has taken iron out of the earth, 

He has melted brass from the stone, 

He has made a deep shaft, 

He has swung suspended afar from men. 

He has searched for stones in darkness, 

He has carved the flint, 

He has cleft the rock. 

He has bound the stream from overflowing. 

He has seen every precious thing. 

He has searched even into the shadows of death. 

And yet, Job cries after his summary : " Where 
is the place of understanding? " 

Since Job's day, man has succeeded in doing 
many things which only God could then do in his 
designing the place which no falcon had seen and 
which no lion had passed by ; 

For man has made a weight for the winds; 

He has decreed whether rain shall fall upon him; 

He has found the way of the lightning; 

He has looked and talked to the ends of the earth; 

He has beheld the infinitesimal; 

He has divided the invisible atom; 

He has learned what is burning in the hearts of the stars. 

And still it is asked : " Where is the place of under- 
standing? " 

It is a long way from the observations of Job 



108 JOHN H. FINLEY 

to those of William James, but we find in this 
dearly lost philosopher an intimation as to the 
status or prospect of the college, in his part of 
the heavens, which it is my part to sweep in these 
few moments. With a comforting certitude, Wil- 
liam James says that a college is a place where 
one learns to know a good man when one sees him. 
It is, after all, only the positive form of Job's 
definition of understanding: — James's is to dis- 
cern the good ; Job's was to " depart from 
evil." 

Whether the definition by James is of status or 
prospect is not clear, but it reveals by implication 
the general location of the ultimate, the Eastern 
college which is or is to be. 

When I first passed up over the Laurel Hills of 
Western Pennsylvania, a little way to the south 
of this place from the west into what was the 
east of a quarter of a century ago, to enter its 
first university, Johns Hopkins, the colleges were, 
I think, closer to Job's definition than James's in 
that more attention was given to protecting from 
the evil than to aggressive discerning of the good. 

And the institutions were not then classified ac- 
cording to magnitude or brilliance into Alpha and 
Beta stars, though there was appreciation of the 
fact that one star did differ from another in glory. 
There was no spectral analysis then. If there had 
been it would have been discovered that the mag- 



THE COLLEGE IN THE EAST 109 

nesium of philosophy and the sodium of mathematics 
and the calcium of language appeared in about the 
same proportions in all. The stars were just plain 
stars, instead of composites or compounds of units. 
There were no great constellations even, such as 
now bestud our academic skies — star clusters with 
a dominant Alpha star of liberal arts and pure 
science holding in close and imperious relationship 
schools of medicine, law, engineering, pharmacy, 
veterinary surgery, dentistry, domestic science, 
etc. ; no solar systems with their planetary wan- 
derers, the university extension lecturers ; no moons 
to take up the wondrous tale of wisdom in even- 
ing courses ; no brilliant comets, those interna- 
tional exchange professors, who startle all our eyes 
in the winter season of the East. And the great 
"Milky Way" of the General Education Board 
and the Carnegie Foundation was not yet arching 
the dome, with nourishing and incalculable wealth. 

Seeing all this college development, which I 
have borrowed an astronomical figure to intimate ; 
seeing the curricular moons and stars which have 
been ordained, and the provision of laboratory and 
dormitory, field and gymnasium, I exclaim after 
the manner of the Psalmist : What precious thing 
is man that Thou art so mindful of him, and the son 
of man that Thou visitest him even in the Fresh- 
man Dormitory ! 

The most impressive scientific lecture I ever 



110 JOHN H. FINLEY 

heard, so far as I now remember, was in the broken 
speech of that great Scandinavian scientist, Ar- 
rhenius, who told how life was propagated, carried 
from planet to planet, from star to star, — the im- 
migrant star-dust evolving in new sequences of life 
on each new star-shore. So is life developing in 
its own peculiar and infinite sequences in each of 
these colleges, though it was propagated by the 
same immigrant, life-giving dust. And there is no 
considerable generalization possible. 

When I first knew of the Eastern colleges they 
seemed all, or most of them, to have foundations 
after the fashion of the heaven which John 
saw in his apocalyptic vision. Need I recall the 
sequence? The first foundation was of jasper, 
the second sapphire, the third chalcedony, the 
fourth emerald, the fifth sardonyx, the sixth sar- 
dius, the seventh chrysolyte, the eighth beryl, the 
ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprasus, the eleventh 
jacinth, the twelfth amethyst. What I mean is 
that the foundation stones or disciplines were 
specifically stratified and identified. There was, 
however, no agreement as to the size of the stones 
till President Butler came with his College En- 
trance Examinations and insisted that if sapphire 
was used it must be so many units long and so many 
cubits wide, and if there were a Virgilian amethys- 
tine top stratum it must be of certain cubic con- 
tent. It was simply a dimensional standardiza- 



THE COLLEGE IN THE EAST 111 

tion of the intercollegiate mind. But it was a 
great step forward. 

The elementary and secondary schools were still 
free to use chrysolyte or chrysoprasus, sardius or 
sardonyx, in whatever order they chose, or to make 
concrete of their precious stones if they preferred. 
And newer and sjmthetic disciplines, as contrasted 
with what Avere known as the " natural disciplines," 
were also included in the dimensional or syllabic 
tables. 

Coincident with this prescription of content, 
there came the definition of the time-unit. So uni- 
versally has this unit, known generally as the Car- 
negie unit, been adopted, that I have intimated 
that it might well be included among the tables 
of weights and measures which appear in the arith- 
metics : 

4j5 minutes make an " hour " 
5 " hours " make a " week " 

36 " weeks " make a " unit " 

15 " units " make a " matriculant " 
5 " matriculant " hours (for one year) make 
a point or count 

60 points or counts make a degree. 

Here, then, is the status reached by the col- 
leges in the East : we have entrance requirements 
standardized as to content and time. 

But while the length and height and depth of 
the several foundation stones have been prevised 



112 JOHN H. FINLEY 

and adopted, and while twelve foundation years, 
elementary and secondary, are indicated in the 
specifications of practically every Eastern college, 
there is now a greater variety in the foundation 
material: chrysoprasis, which is Greek, is seldom 
used ; sardius, which is Latin, is no longer uni- 
versal. Instead are found stones of disciplines of 
more recent origin : sedimentary rocks, deposited 
by modern experience, synthetic stones, made in 
scientific laboratories. Indeed, the secondary 
school builders, who are engaged in the laying of 
foundations for life as well as for college — and 
mainly for life — are more and more insistent that 
whatever is used for the life foundations shall be 
accepted as suitable material for the college en- 
trance: Greek or biology. 

There is prejudice against synthetic articles 
which are " just as good." There is a prejudice 
in favor of the old labels. Cottonseed olive oil 
may have the carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen in the 
same proportions as the oil produced from the fruit 
of Minerva's tree; terra cotta (man-cooked earth) 
may be more lasting than marble God-composed, 
reenforced concrete than building stone, but it is 
only slowly that inherited appraisements are modi- 
fied. 

This admission of new disciplines in the sec- 
ondary period, with selective liberty, has resulted 
in enrichment, as in the case of the college cur- 



THE COLLEGE IN THE EAST 113 

riculum, but there are signs that asterism or con- 
stellating is setting in these as in the collegiate 
system. I have no prophecy to make here except 
of a thought which came to me in midocean last 
year — out where provincial and national consid- 
erations are less disturbing — the thought that if 
we could but bring together and into comparison 
the content of what each people thinks it most es- 
sential that its children should receive, up to the 
age of sixteen, let us say, through formal teaching 
out of its own experience and that of the race — 
what information, what discipline — we should, 
after eliminating that which is local and peculiar 
to each people, reach the race's educational founda- 
tions. We should find what are accounted the vital, 
elemental, conscious tuitions of what President 
Butler calls the " international mind," of the race 
mind, which, as a poet-teacher, Woodbury, has put 
it, has been " building itself from immemorial time 
out of this mystery of thought and passion, as 
generation after generation kneels and fights and 
fades, takes unerringly the best that anywhere 
comes to be in all the world, holds to it with the 
cling of fate, and lets all else fall into oblivion." 
I believe that though this formal tuition, which 
every people gives to its children, is colored by 
prejudice and restrained by tradition and dis- 
torted by individual ignorance and selfishness, it 
yet gives a clear indication of the disciplines and 



114. JOHN H. FINLEY 

knowledges by which the race is to rise. It is that 
genius of the species which, as Maeterlinck says 
of plants, is to save it from the stupidity of the 
individual. It is that which gives one confidence in 
a democracy, in the great, deep instincts of the 
race. 

Upon these deep racial foundations are these 
colleges East or West to be built and not upon an 
incidental art or upon elected fragments of this or 
that, valuable as they may be as a basis for certain 
life occupations. 

New disciplines are to be admitted to these 
foundations ; the new racial acquisitions must be 
gradually embodied as a result of the new uses 
which the race is making of this earth and uni- 
verse, but their values must be tested, whether 
you use the figure of nutrition or stress and strain. 

There is need, incidentally, of a great labora- 
tory for the study of such nutritive values, such 
intellectual physics, entrance qualitative analysis, 
— for such studies as Thorndike, of Columbia, for 
example, is carrying out. 

I hold to the Apocalyptical figure a moment 
longer, until I have said that we are now at one of 
the many gates into the place of understanding 
(for as there are many gates pictured for the 
place of ultimate happiness, so are there many 
for this place but set each at the same founda- 
tional height). 



THE COLLEGE IN THE EAST 115 

And if I, unable to describe, in any detail or in 
any reliable generalizations, the colleges of the 
East as they actually are, tell you, having led 
the way to their gates, what I see them to be in the 
prospect or in probable future of my confident 
hope, and any assisting effort that I can give, if I 
can point you to the place in the heavens to which 
they are moving, I beg you will let that be my 
contribution to this symposium. 

The multiple " place of understanding " is the 
place not only of better compensation, of higher 
specialization, of longer days, of longer years, or 
nights as well as days, but the place where the 
world is " reborn in the young soul " (to quote my 
poet-teacher again), where the pollen of the past's 
richest, noblest flowering is caught into a fresh- 
blown mind — a mind which would have been sterile, 
without these microspores, these microcosmic seeds 
scattered from a rich world mind ; — the place 
where through disciplines, and knowledges, the lit- 
eratures, sciences, and arts, one enters into a race 
mind, goes out into the bush as the Australian 
youth with the sage of his tribe to learn its solemn 
secrets, — that is, into an understanding of the 
" continuing sacrifice " through which one age has 
fed the next, one culture has given its fruit to an- 
other, one mind has lighted a generation, while 
burning itself out. 

And the curricula are to be molded not primar- 



116 JOHN H. FINLEY 

ilj by pedagogists, but by great poets and philoso- 
phers of science, the transfigurers who will fuse 
the knowledges through new interpretations, bring 
to youth a world literature, an all-embracing sci- 
ence, a synoptic, social gospel, and a practical 
philosophy, whose supreme end, as Kant said, is to 
find " the method of educating and ruling man- 
kind." Precursors and transfigurers, who will con- 
vert atom and molecule, ion and electron, root and 
blossom into spiritual phenomena and forces, even 
as he who first dreamed of the atomic theory and 
laid aside his own affairs to learn the nature of 
things (natura verum) and relate them to the na- 
ture of the gods (natura deorum). I do not ven- 
ture to predict the detail of these curricula, but I 
do know that they will not be gerrymandered by 
softness or narrowness or numerical avarice. 

They are to be curricula of personal salvation 
(for I borrow the intimation of C. Hanford Hen- 
derson's answer to the august question, " What is 
it to be educated? " that " education and personal 
salvation are one and the same thing "). ^•' 

I have been impressed, rereading Dante's 
" Divine Comedy," by the wonderful discrimina- 
tion shown in providing for the punishment of 
souls lost or in limbo. There is not a prescribed or 
elective number of objective standard units of 
agony to be endured. Such an inferno or purga- 
torio would have made his great epic as uninterest- 



THE COLLEGE IN THE EAST 117 

ing and colorless as the average college catalogue. 
No. His punishments take character of the souls 
of the men who are suffering. Their tasks are 
fitted to their soul's needs. They are not simply 
doing things, pursuing purgatorial and infernal 
vocations ; they are working out their soul's salva- 
tion or their soul's eternal torment. 

And that curriculum of salvation is to be vitally, 
daily related with the earth life, the home, the 
community, the state, the world, — ^with the race 
mind. 

These colleges are not to be like unto the col- 
leges which Samuel Butler describes (in that satire 
" Erewhon " which Augustine Birrell has called the 
best of its kind since Gulliver) — the Colleges of 
Unreason, where the principal study was " hypo- 
thetics," where they argued that to teach a boy 
merely the nature of things which existed in the 
world around him would be giving him but a narrow 
and shallow conception of the universe, which it 
was urged might contain all manner of things 
which were not now found therein, and where they 
spent their time in imagining all sorts of utterly 
strange and impossible contingencies, conversing 
even in a hypothetical language and having, in- 
deed, to maintain professorship of Unreason and 
Evasion in order to preserve vested opinions 
and traditional creeds out of which the race has 
risen. 



118 JOHN H. FINLEY 

For the colleges which I am describing are to 
be ready, alert, to weave into their curricula what 
the new human uses of the world add to the race's 
consciousness so far as it can be interpreted and 
is vital to be preserved. 

I had once to defend a college course which was 
conventionally so uncultural that it was necessary 
to open the windows. It was a course in public 
health. Going one day to the laboratory I had diffi- 
culty at first in staying in the room. A half-dozen 
college men were standing around the carcass of a 
cow that had died or had been put to death because 
of tuberculosis. "Uncultural?" I said. "These 
young men are preparing themselves to perform the 
duties of an office which is the nearest of all our ex- 
isting public functions to those of the most sacred 
official in ancient life." We have the highest 
classical prototype for them. He was the harus- 
pex who examined the entrails of animals in order 
to divine the will of the gods. These young men 
were examining the interior parts of a cow in order 
to interpret the laws of God to men. If Virgil 
had only put this into his Goorgics, the process 
might have risen to cultural dignity. 

If this multiple college is to be merely or chiefly 
a place of discipline, then its tasl<s might better be 
given over to the high schools, to the gymnasia. If 
it is to be a place of special preparation for life, 
then it would better give way to the professional, 



THE COLLEGE IN THE EAST 119 

the technical school, the university. If it is to be 
a place merely through which to attain, in an agree- 
able way, social position and conventional culture, 
to take part in contests of bodily strength and 
skill, or to enjoy only the companionships and 
friendships of living (that is, if it is to be a great 
college, country or city, club), it is perhaps hardly 
worth preserving as an American institution. But 
if it is to be for the many (what it has been, thank 
God, for the few), if it is to be for all the fit, a 
place of understanding, of rebirth, of entering the 
race mind, then is the college which I see in pros- 
pect the most precious of all our educational pos- 
sessions. 

I am not sure that I have made it sufficiently 
clear in outline or curriculum so that you can even 
tell (to borrow an observation of Gilbert Chester- 
ton's) whether it is a " cloud " or a " cape," a 
star or a light upon earth. And this would be an 
unhappy attempt at definition if I left you in 
doubt, for, as Chesterton has further said, the 
most dangerous ideals are those which may be 
taken for something practical and the most danger- 
ous practical things are those which are taken for 
the ideal. 

But I assure you that the thing I see is a 
" cape " and not a " cloud," that it is something 
substantial which will build itself impregnably not 
alone on some " cape sublime " frowning upon the 



laO JOHN H. FINLEY 

idle foam of time, but in whatever latitude or longi- 
tude colleges stand with such a purpose as that 
which I have tried to define, — there gather great 
souls as teachers. This is the prospect that I have 
in hope and desire for the colleges of the East. 



THE PRESENT STATUS AND 

PROBABLE FUTURE OF THE 

COLLEGE IN THE SOUTH 

PRESIDENT WILLIAM P. FEW 

The development of American institutions of 
higher education is one of the outstanding facts of 
our time; but this development has largely taken 
place within the last fifty years. And while this 
development in other parts of the country has 
been going on, the educational history of the 
Southern States has been interrupted by the 
devastations of civil war, by the nightmare of re- 
construction, and by long, tedious years of con- 
valescence. 

For a good part of the past half-century educa- 
tional conditions in the Southern States have there- 
fore been altogether chaotic. The circumstances 
considered, however, much has been ace )mpHshed 
by self-sacrificing and high-minded men and 
women. These willing and capable workers for 
their devotion to great causes and for their per- 
sonal qualities deserve high rank among Amer- 
ican teachers of their generation. But they have 

121 



122 WILLIAM P. FEW 

been hampered by lack of material and educational 
equipment. 

In these impoverished and confused times 
it has been difficult to standardize our South- 
ern colleges at the level of the best educational 
thought and practice. But towards this end sev- 
eral causes have steadily worked. Such has been 
an organization, for example, like the Association 
of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the South- 
ern States, begun nineteen years ago with a mem- 
bership of six colleges and now composed of all the 
stronger colleges and preparatory schools. This 
association exists for the promotion of better edu- 
cational standards and ideals, and it has from the 
beginning been an influence for good. 

Another such agency is a movement started by 
the Southern JNIethodist Church seventeen years 
ago. In the year 1898 the General Conference of 
this church created an educational commission to 
consist of ten practical educators who should have 
full authority to formulate minimum requirements 
for admission and graduation, these requirements 
to be enforced by all colleges affiliated with the 
church. Since that date the commission has met 
at least once during each quadrennium and has pre- 
scribed standards by which all colleges affiliated 
with this church have been classified. 

A third agency, important though its Influence 
on college standards has been indirectly exerted, is 



THE COLLEGE IN THE SOUTH 123 

the General Education Board of New York. This 
board has set up no educational standards to which 
colleges that would seek its aid must conform. 
But it has made wise and statesmanlike efforts to 
strengthen some of the more promising colleges ; it 
has had on exhibition in its office carefully col- 
lected data on Southern colleges ; and it has done 
something towards bringing Southern colleges into 
contact with educational methods and men in other 
parts of the country. All of these things have had 
a tendency to lift the general level and so to raise 
the educational standards of Southern colleges. 

Still another agency is the Carnegie Foundation 
for the Advancement of Teaching. The Founda- 
tion adopted a definition of a college and a stand- 
ard of entrance requirements, and declined to put 
on the Foundation any institutions that did not 
conform to its standards. The desire to be placed 
on the Carnegie Foundation has influenced very 
few Southern colleges to raise their standards. 
But the Foundation has exerted a still more potent 
influence. President Pritchett made a thorough- 
going study of American colleges and published the 
results. He gave each college a rating on the basis 
of its admission requirements. This publication 
had a wide circulation and exerted an unprece- 
dented influence. 

The last agency which I shall mention, and the 
one which is intrinsically the most interesting and 



124. WILLIAM P. FEW 

ultimately the most important, is the small number 
of individual institutions that have, through all the 
cross purposes and warring forces of our years 
of educational wandering, been courageous enough 
and far-seeing enough to stand and call aloud, as 
the voice of one crying in the wilderness, for a bet- 
ter order of things, and that have not hesitated to 
sacrifice in so great a cause the prestige of num- 
bers and the more immediately satisfying compen- 
sation of tuition fees. These colleges have stood 
as beacons of light along the hard road of progress 
and as bulwarks of strength against which the in- 
tellectual confusions, and even at times the surging 
passions of the hour, have dashed themselves in 
vain. To such colleges — and they have been found 
in all parts of the Union, North and South — the 
country owes a debt of gratitude it can never pay. 
Such forces as these, though different in origin 
and different in the method and sphere of their 
operation, have all been working together towards 
one end, — the making of stronger, better equipped, 
and more serviceable institutions of the higher 
learning throughout the Southern States. And 
they have all been strengthened by the new pros- 
perity and hope that in recent years have come to 
Southern people. Improvement is now everywhere 
evident and is sure, I think, to go on rapidly. 
Movements in our time when once set forward are 
apt to be quick and far-reaching in their results. 



THE COLLEGE IN THE SOUTH 125 

The South has already a number of colleges that 
in standards of work, in ideals of excellence, and in 
the quality of the men who teach and the quality 
of the men who are taught are thoroughly respect- 
able, even when judged in the light of the great 
colleges of the world. Colleges of this sort are of 
inestimable value in Southern civilization. They 
will set the pace for the intellectual life, and 
through their influence on the lower schools and 
through the leaders of the people that they sup- 
ply will have a large share in shaping and molding 
the structure of our entire civilization. The col- 
leges themselves are being rapidly refashioned and, 
in a period of flux and change now, they are never- 
theless taking a setting and direction that are apt 
to fix their character and work for many years to 
come. 

Southern colleges, then, coming into their 
period of growth at a time when colleges in 
other parts of the country have reached ma- 
turity, have the extraordinary opportunity to 
develop in the light of the experience of others. 
We ought to learn from the mistakes of 
others as well as from their successes. And 
the future of our colleges will depend on how well 
we learn our lesson. Especially must we learn 
how to bring the processes of education eff^ectively 
to bear on a larger proportion of students. The 
growing importance that secondary concerns hold 



126 WILLIAM P. FEW 

in the thought of undergraduates is more and more 
tending to obscure the true ends of a college course. 
If we will take command of the situation before 
the tyranny of public opinion is fastened upon us 
by students, young alumni, and communities 
taught to demand this sort of entertainment at 
the hands of colleges, then I beheve it will be pos- 
sible for us to shift the center of interest from 
athletics and other equally irrelevant undergradu- 
ate absorptions to the intellectual pursuits and 
wholesome recreations that are proper to college 
life. This shifting of the center of gravity will be 
helped by adequate regulation and due subordina- 
tion of athletics; by demanding strict attendance 
upon college duties ; by exacting a reasonable 
amount of intellectual work; and by enforcing 
rigorous standards of scholarship. In developing 
our colleges we have the chance to put upon self- 
cultivation and wholesome living an emphasis they 
do not now usually get in American colleges. 

Our opportunity consists partly too in strength- 
ening the personal element in education and 
thereby attaining the end for which colleges pri- 
marily exist, that is, to bring the right kind of 
teacher into sympathetic and helpful contact with 
the right kind of student under conditions that 
will make for the highest success and happiness of 
both teacher and student. The pioneer stage in 
American education has passed. The propaganda 



THE COLLEGE IN THE SOUTH 127 

for enlarged and improved educational machinery 
and organization has won. In nearly all of our 
states education as an opportunity for every youth 
has been achieved. The watchword henceforth is 
to be not more education but better. And this 
better education, we all concede, can only come 
through better teachers. How to get better teach- 
ers is a question much discussed. "Higher 
salaries," says one. " Better technical training," 
says another. " More expensive equipment in 
buildings, laboratories, libraries, playgrounds," 
say still others. 

But success in this difficult field, I believe, lies 
rather in magnifying the office of the teacher, and 
in giving to education itself a larger meaning and 
mission for our whole national life. Hirelings 
never can give the truest service. The measuring 
of a man by the wage scale can never lift teaching 
above a stale and unprofitable business. 

Over against this conception we now have the 
opportunity to set the doctrine of the teacher as a 
worker at the hard tasks of society, as a builder 
of civilization, who, if he be efficient enough, may 
become a shaping, transforming influence like 
Moses or Socrates. Thoughts and aspirations are 
after all the greatest forces in civilization, and 
from educators and those they educate must come 
this high leadership of ideas and ideals in the serv- 
ice of the republic. The measure of the teacher's 



128 WILLIAM P. FEW 

influence is not the amount or quality of intellec- 
tual nourishment that we may dole out to docile 
youth, but the kind of guidance he gives to indi- 
vidual minds, to communities, and to states and the 
moral energy that he succeeds in producing. And 
teachers of this higher sort can never be bought. 

Expert training is not our supreme need, either. 
For teachers, our schools of all grades need not 
simply experts in the several branches of learning, 
but men and women of ideas and power. The too 
exclusive use of scholarship tests in the selecting 
of teachers is, in my judgment, one of the gravest 
defects in modem education, especially in our 
American colleges and universities. Men and 
women of ideas and originating power are needed 
at all times, but they would seem to be especially 
needed in times of unsettlement and rapid change. 
And in spite of all misgivings, most competent men 
actually at the work of upbuilding and rebuilding 
Southern civilization believe that we are standing 
now at the very threshold of a new era of growth 
and development. The belief itself, even if it were 
not so amply justified by the facts, would tend to 
produce the expected result. An age of hopeful- 
ness is apt to be an age of achievement. 

I do not underestimate equipment and organiza- 
tion, but I would emphasize the fact, which is so 
often overlooked in our time, that these things are 
of no value except in so far as they furnish the 



THE COLLEGE IN THE SOUTH 129 

means by which competent men and women may 
work effectively. The one sure way to promote the 
welfare of the state and nation is to build sound- 
ness into the mind and character of the youth of 
our country. Those who have command of this 
source of power must not mistake themselves or be 
mistaken by others for innocent pedagogues and 
school-keepers. Affording as it does opportunity 
for the exercise of creative ability and for a high 
order of usefulness, life for us teachers, we ought 
to feel, is not a weak and passive thing, but a great 
and noble calling. 

Despite some superficial appearances to the con- 
trary and despite some real difficulties that must be 
overcome, I am convinced that this section has the 
best chance in America to build up at least a few, 
I will not say big, but genuinely great educational 
institutions within this generation. And therefore, 
I think there never was in the history of the world a 
more inviting field for teachers with building power 
than right here and now ; and this sort of teacher 
is going to be developed and held not by institu- 
tions that put their faith in size, in numbers, in 
big material resources, but rather by those that are 
dedicated to sound ideas and disciplined by sacri- 
fice in the causes of men. For it is never the ma- 
terial but the ideal that abides and commands. 

The greatness of our colleges will depend upon the 
elevation of the teaching profession, and the eleva- 



ISO WILLIAM P. FEW 

tion of the teaching prof ession does not depend upon 
higher salaries, better technical training, or more 
elaborate equipment, but upon giving it the proper 
dignity and importance in our life. This involves 
a new and truer popular understanding of educa- 
tion. And education we must come to regard not 
as an agency for making skilled wage-earners or 
experts in knowledge, but for developing men of 
moral and intellectual competence. This defin- 
ing of education to include not merely the train- 
ing of the hands or the mind but the shaping 
of the whole personality lifts the teaching pro- 
fession into a great art in which excellence is as 
well worth striving for as in poetry or architecture, 
and in which success is perhaps harder to achieve ; 
for this art deals with the most difficult as well as 
the most precious material in the world. 

And I have the faith to believe that at least some 
of our colleges will go this way to greatness. 



THE PRESENT STATUS AND 

PROBABLE FUTURE OF THE 

COLLEGE IN THE WEST 

PRESIDENT WILLIAM F. SLOCUM 

The college has a well differentiated character 
and history in the educational evolution of the 
United States. It was the earliest organized insti- 
tution for the higher learning in the country, and 
has so maintained its position and continued its 
contribution to the moral and intellectual life of 
the nation that, as has been said of it by our ablest 
expert, it is " the most permanent factor in our 
educational system." 

Successfully it has borne adverse criticism, 
wisely adjusted itself to the growth of methods 
while broadening its range of subjects whenever 
reasonable demand has arisen; but no foundation 
has so persistently and consistently held to its main 
purpose and its high ideals as the American col- 
lege. Universities, technical education, public 
school systems, have passed through distinct modi- 
fications, while with its dominating ethical and in- 
tellectual purpose it has steadily and persistently 
maintained its unifying ideal. 

131 



132 WILLIAM F. SLOCUM 

The all-controlling end of the true college has 
been, is and always must be, to train men. It 
exists primarily to produce persons of character 
and intelligence, who as such can hold successfully 
the position to which they are called, and do well 
the work for which they are especially fitted. 

The English colleges from which the American 
sprang, seeking to discover truth by means of 
scholarship, with their tutorial system and more 
than a score of presidents for three thousand 
students, have made the spirit of their training 
individualistic in order to produce leaders in the 
political, social, religious, and intellectual life of 
that empire. The Oxford and Cambridge colleges 
have been the center of " the humanities," because 
of their intellectual and moral discipline. Affirm- 
ing that these studies appeal directly to " the finer 
instincts and affections," they have produced fully 
developed men with noble sentiments and strength 
of character. These colleges are the mothers of 
commanding leaders and great movements. With- 
out them England's political, ethical, and religious 
life would have been unspeakably less powerful. 
The English college is the representative of the 
strength of her character and her institutions. 

It was this that Lord Bryce so strongly em- 
phasized in his memorable address, when the 
Rhodes Scholarships were established at Oxford, as 
he urged that there should be the utmost possible 



THE COLLEGE IN THE WEST 133 

degree of efRciency in equipment and instruction 
for scientific education; but he insisted still more 
strongly that to subordinate the interests of the 
humanities to those of science is deliberately to 
dethrone the essential function of the college. He 
agreed that there should be a scientific foundation 
for every department of industry in its appli- 
cation to the arts of life, but said that this 
is not the primary function of the college, 
which has a much more fundamental and essential 
part to play in the creation of the leadership of 
the nation. 

The mission of the college has been and always 
must be, in the old world and the new, in the East 
and in the West, to train men, by means of teach- 
ing, to be servants of humanity. The great busi- 
ness of the college is to teach, and by teaching to 
fit its students to become serviceable in the life of 
the world. 

It is not so much what it teaches and how many 
subjects; but something it must teach so that its 
graduates shall be strong to serve, and powerful 
enough to battle the evil of the world, and con- 
struct virtue in the characters of men and women. 
This was why the Oxford College taught the hu- 
manities, why the famous University of Salerno 
had but one faculty ; while both alike sought to 
create scholars who should " serve their fellow- 
men." 



1^ WILLIAM F. SLOCUM 

The main purpose of the German gymnasium 
and university is to discover truth and to make it 
known in all its relations ; the English and Amer- 
ican college has always sought to discover truth 
by scholarship and train men for service. This 
must ever be its exalted function, and its perma- 
nency is conditioned upon remaining true to its 
birthright and the highest of all educational pre- 
rogatives. To be false to the sacred trust which 
the college has placed in the keeping of its trus- 
tees and faculties is not only to sell one's birth- 
right for pottage, but it is a sacrifice of the most 
momentous issues in the whole educational move- 
ment. 

The college by no means assumes that it alone 
has assigned to it the ethical training of the lead- 
ers of the nation ; but it stands as no other in- 
stitution by its traditions, its history and ideals, 
as a foundation whose dominating end is the prepa- 
ration of students for intellectual and moral leader- 
ship. This is the noblest of all missions in the 
training of the youth of a nation. 

If the American college loses sight of this sacred 
duty, it becomes false to its trust, recreant and 
faithless before the most essential of all the ends 
for which an educational movement can exist. All 
attacks upon its function, all would-be modifica- 
tions of its range and scope, and of its four years 
of opportunity for study and spiritual growth, are 



THE COLLEGE IN THE WEST 1S5 

the outcome of a misconception of the end which 
led to its foundation. 

Lord Bryce's position is the true one. There 
should be the utmost possible degree of efficiency 
in scientific education; but to subordinate purely 
intellectual and moral discipline to the interests of 
science is not only to dethrone the essential intent 
of the college, but to miss the pre-eminent function 
of education. 

Whatever the changes that have and must con- 
tinue to come in subject and method, the end for 
which our fathers planned and toiled in founding 
Harvard College and those which followed should 
be conserved in the East and West, for the sake 
of the preservation of the nation and holding it 
to its mission in the life of the world. Three 
things were written large in the history and gov- 
ernment of these early New England colleges: 
" piety," " morality," and " learning," all of them 
essential for " the public weal." 

The status and future of the Western college 
must be tested by those purposes for which it was 
established and developed in England and America. 

The maintenance of the college in the West de- 
pends very largely upon conformity to what it 
has been in the East, and upon the realization of 
the exalted aim which called it into existence, and 
which has been its genius in years gone by. 

For this reason it is exceedingly important that 



136 WILLIAM F. SLOCUM 

with self-respect it should stand independently 
upon its own feet, and refuse to be driven from its 
noble purpose by those who are interested, for 
good and sufficient reasons, in other types of edu- 
cational foundations. 

The attempt to modify its curriculum, to take 
away from it one or two years of the time which 
it must have for perfecting its work, is a mark of 
subserviency which is unworthy of its past history 
and its future possibilities. 

The questions growing out of the length of 
time it takes a student to prepare himself for his 
life work, the forcing upon it of what is called the 
" practical side of education," and the demand for 
shortening preparation, especially when all this is 
done at the expense of the college, are fraught 
with gravest danger and serious consequences, not 
only to the college but to the best life of the 
nation. 

A comparatively few years ago in the West the 
opinion was widely promulgated that the day of 
the college was past ; that it was to be crushed 
between the secondary school and the university; 
that it was a sort of unnecessary luxury and that 
the day was not far distant when it must close its 
doors, discharge its faculties, and say to its eager 
young men and women : " There is nothing further 
that we can do for you, our mission is ended." 
That issue has been successfully met, quietly, ear- 



THE COLLEGE IN THE WEST 137 

nestly, and deliberately. The men who agitated 
this conception have either disappeared or for the 
most part have passed into silence, while the lead- 
ers of the college movement are standing with inde- 
pendence and self-respect, unmoved, courageous, 
and hopeful, declaring that the college is just 
entering on its largest mission and its most im- 
portant work. 

The same independence, far-sightedness, and 
self-respect should come into play in meeting the 
new form of attack upon its integrity, in the 
present advocacy of the so-called " Junior Col- 
lege." This is another demand that it should take 
a secondary place in the educational movement, 
step aside from its high office, and abrogate its 
unsurpassed opportunity for service. To yield to 
this new attack is but a step in the path which 
leads ultimately to its obliteration, and thus to lose 
sight of the most important element in the educa- 
tional movement in America. 

No inteEigent person questions the place that 
professional and technical education has taken and 
must assume in the development of the nation. We 
must not forget also that there is enormous danger 
in the tendency which loses sight of what the Eng- 
lish college conserved by its study of the humani- 
ties, which, as Lord Bryce says in the address to 
which reference has been made, " appealed thor- 
oughly to the finer instincts and affections." It is 



138 WILLIAM F. SLOCUM 

the old problem of the proper adjustment in the 
development of the individual between what is 
physical and that which is spiritual. It raises the 
question as to whether a nation given over to love 
of the material side of life, or, if you please, of 
mere science, is to find its true destiny. Is love 
of learning for its own sake, of literature, of 
poetry, of art, of philosophy, of ethics, and, most 
of all, of religion to sink into the background and 
lose its place of commanding pre-eminence? 

In meeting this issue, as is being done in the 
West at the present time, on the whole with dis- 
tinct success, it is recognized that four years in 
college is not necessary so much for certain courses 
of study as it is essential for giving opportunity 
for that intellectual and moral growth which is 
absolutely requisite in the production of trained 
men and women. The law of growth as established 
by the Creator bears even more fully upon the 
development of a human soul than it does upon the 
production of crops from the soil or animals on 
the face of the earth. Forced growth in the evo- 
lution of character is suicidal. 

In discussing the present status and probable 
future of the college in the West, one must con- 
sider it in the light of what it has been in the past, 
and whether it can and will maintain its efficiency, 
its strength, and its peculiar character. Its 
value and its stability are conditioned upon con- 



THE COLLEGE IN THE WEST 139 

serving its primary mission of producing trained 
men for leadership. 

One answer to this inquiry can be found in ex- 
amining the condition of its physical and financial 
standing. Without income and equipment it can- 
not possibly do its work or fulfill its high preroga- 
tive. Reference will be made to only a few typical 
Western colleges, as illustrating the position taken 
in this paper. 

It is not maintained that all the colleges of the 
West are fitted for the work to which they are 
called. Many of them ought never to have been 
instituted, as is true of other educational estab- 
lishments. Others have so far departed from that 
to which they were called that they cannot recover, 
and should drop out of existence. Some have been 
founded on too narrow a basis to be of any distinct 
value. 

If, however, it can be shown that there are cer- 
tain colleges holding vantage ground of strategic 
importance which are doing effective work and 
carrying out the ends for which they were founded, 
it will establish the proposition that these and 
others like them should be maintained at all haz- 
ards. Moreover, there is not time to do more than 
refer to this limited number of institutions. What 
is maintained is that there are colleges in the West 
that rank with the best in the country, which are 
holding true to the traditions of the past and ful- 



140 WILLIAM F. SLOCUM 

filling the intent of these well-difFerentlated and 
independent institutions of higher learning. Ex- 
amination will be made of seven only, which hold 
widely separated geographical positions, and which 
are admirably and wisely located so as to be centers 
of large and commanding influence. 

The first is Beloit College in Wisconsin, founded 
for the purpose of carrying out the conceptions 
which established New England institutions. It 
possesses endowment funds of $1,400,000 and 
buildings and equipment which have cost in the 
vicinity of $520,000. These have steadily in- 
creased during the past twenty or more years, and 
it has a group of 375 students, with an able and 
well-trained faculty. Its standards are such that 
colleges of its own type in the East accept its 
examinations. It has fulfilled in a marked degree 
the intellectual, moral, and religious purpose for 
which it was established in that section of the 
country. 

The second is Carleton College in Minnesota, 
founded by the early settlers with a distinctly re- 
ligious as well as educational motive. It has passed 
through years of struggle and heroic devotion. At 
present it occupies a place of influence in its im- 
portant location. It had last year 456 under- 
graduate students, and its endowments have in- 
creased in the last seventeen years from $250,000 
to a little over $1,000,000. Its grounds, buildings, 



THE COLLEGE IN THE WEST 141 

and equipments have a value of $565,000. Every 
college and university of the East is very glad to 
welcome as undergraduate or graduate student 
those who have passed the examinations at this in- 
stitution. Its influence locally and nationally is 
already making itself felt in ways of which its 
founders would approve. 

The third is Colorado College, located in the 
heart of the Rocky Mountain region, in a city pre- 
eminently well fitted to be a college town. It also 
was founded by the early pioneers for a very dis- 
tinctively ethical and religious purpose. After 
years of severe effort and many discouragements, 
having made its standards the same as those of the 
leading institutions of New England, it began its 
advance movement. It has an endowment in care- 
fully invested funds of $1,042,000, and has spent 
$968,000 upon buildings, equipment, and its li- 
brary of 87,000 volumes. It has a faculty which 
will compare favorably in teaching power and in- 
tellectual strength with the faculties of other lead- 
ing colleges of the country. Its graduates are 
received into the professional schools and universi- 
ties of the country. Its students to-day number 
708. 

The fourth typical institution is located in the 
center of Iowa: Grinnell College. It, too, was 
founded by men of high character and rare devo- 
tion. It has held with great tenacity to high 



14a WILLIAM F. SLOCUM 

ideals in its undergraduate work, and it has a 
faculty of unusual ability, which numbers among 
its members men of scholarship, whose publica- 
tions are known throughout the scientific and edu- 
cational world. It possesses an endowment of 
$1,305,000, and an investment in buildings, equip- 
ment, and library of $764,000. Its students num- 
ber 663, and its educational standards are as high 
as those of any of the other colleges to which 
reference has been made. 

The fifth foundation is situated in the state of 
Ohio: Oberlin College. Few institutions in the 
world have had such a record of loyalty to religion 
and intellectual standards as has this foundation. 
It, too, was established by thoughtful men pos- 
sessed of a spirit of unusual self-sacrifice. Its 
regular undergraduate students number something 
over 1,000. It possesses an endowment, includ- 
ing its last gift, of over $3,000,000, and has 
an investment in equipment and buildings of 
$1,409,000. 

The sixth is in California : Pomona College. Its 
early history is largely a repetition of what has 
already been said in regard to the others men- 
tioned. Its standards are also recognized by the 
older institutions of the East, and it holds a place 
of strategic importance in its large and important 
commonwealth. Its students last year numbered 
515, and its endowment at the present time is a 



THE COLLEGE IN THE WEST 143 

little over $1,000,000. It hag an investment in 
equipment and buildings of $467,000. 

The last institution is in the state of Washing- 
ton: Whitman College. It holds an important 
situation in the new Northwest. Its beginnings 
were practically the same as those of the other 
foundations which have been enumerated. Its 
ideals, aims, and purpose are tho^e distinctly of 
the historical colleges of the country. Its faculty 
has the same rare devotion, and it, too, holds a 
position with high standards corresponding to 
those of such colleges as Allegheny, Williams, and 
Amherst. It had last year an endowment of 
$663,000, an investment in buildings and equip- 
ment of over $300,000, and an enrollment of 450 
students. 

Here are seven educational organizations that 
have stood loyally to the historic standards, ideals, 
and purposes of the college. They have refused to 
yield to the demands that have been made and are 
still being made for a modification of courses and of 
the time occupied in the training of their students. 
They bold to the four years necessary for gradua- 
tion. There are in them 4,057 students. Their 
Invested funds, the income of which is used for 
current expenses, amount to $9,353,000, and the 
total cost of their buildings and equipments has 
been $5,012,000, making a gross valuation of en- 
dowments and equipments of $14,365,000. They 



144s WILLIAM F. SLOCUM 

possess faculties that in scholarship and academic 
attainments will rank with those of such institu- 
tions as Williams, Amherst, and Bowdoin. Five 
of them are on the list of accepted institutions of 
" The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement 
of Teaching." All have been recognized by the 
" General Education Board." Their graduates 
have won high distinction in the leading schools of 
medicine, law, journalism, theology, and science. 
Many of them are on the faculties of such institu- 
tions as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, 
and Leland Stanford Jr. Universities. Others 
have become leaders at the bar, in the pulpit, in 
medicine and surgery. An unusually large num- 
ber are statesmen of the highest order, and no 
group of colleges in the world has sent as many 
in proportion to their graduates into foreign ser- 
vice under missionary boards, as physicians, teach- 
ers, clergymen, and administrative officers. Their 
influence in the life of the world and of our own 
nation is of inestimable value. They have all now 
reached a point in their history where it is impos- 
sible to think of their disintegration or of their 
going backwards, either in their material pros- 
perity or in their academic standing. It may well 
be doubted whether there are seven colleges in the 
world that are to-day doing as much for the moral, 
religious, and intellectual leadership as are those to 
which reference has been made. If one desires to 



THE COLLEGE IN THE WEST 145 

know the status and future of the college in the 
West, he has but to visit and critically study the 
present work of these seven typical colleges, to 
come in contact with their faculties and students, 
to examine their equipments, and, above all, to 
trace the history of their graduates in the life of 
the nation and of the world. 

Without doubt all of these institutions could use 
to great advantage larger endowments and equip- 
ments and increased faculties. Practically every 
one of them is suffering from the stress and strain 
of restricted income and there is no institution in 
America which could be aided to greater advantage 
than these colleges and those that are like them, 
if one cares for the moral, religious, and intellect- 
ual standards of the nation. 

In spite of these limitations, they are render- 
ing a service of incomparable value and are holding 
to those conceptions and ideals which have made 
the Enghsh college a power in the history of 
the British Empire, and the American college a 
force in the creation of the best leadership in the 
country. 

Their past history, however, is not comparable 
with the possibilities of their future service. The 
almost irresistible movement towards the domina- 
tion of material things, the power of wealth, the 
struggle for preferment, are tending in many ways 
towards lowering of ethical standards, and against 



14^0 WILLIAM F. SLOCUM 

that which Lord Bryce has said are the essential 
qualities in the making of a nation. 

Without such influence as they exert political 
and moral decline will come to this people as it has 
to others. The holding of the nation to the " finer 
instincts and aff^ections " which make for strength 
of character carries with it the glory and sanctity 
of a commonwealth. 

It still holds true that the great business of the 
college is to fit its students to be serviceable in 
the life of the world, and so to " serve their fel- 
low-men." Its effort must ever be to discover 
truth by scholarship, and train men for service. 
This is its birthright, and this is also the noblest 
of aU educational prerogatives. The university 
and the technical school have a mission of far- 
reaching significance. There is also a well-defined 
and differentiated mission for the college, which, if 
lost sight of, destroys its raison d'etre. 

No college to-day has fully risen to the impor- 
tance or the privilege of its opportunity. It needs 
to guard itself with great care in order that it 
may realize its errand to humanity, but that it is 
rendering a service of incomparable and inestimable 
value there can be no doubt. 



THE FUNCTION OF THE COL- 
LEGE AS DISTINCT FROM THE 
HIGH SCHOOL, THE PRO- 
FESSIONAL SCHOOL, AND 
THE UNIVERSITY 

PRESIDENT ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 

I MUST begin this paper by asking a question — 
a question addressed to the audience. The answer 
is a matter of vital concern to me. I wish to ask 
you whether from one statement which I shall give 
another logically follows. If we say that every- 
thing that could be said about the American col- 
lege has been said, does it follow that there is noth- 
ing more to say? My own opinion is that it does 
not follow at all and I appeal to the science of logic 
for justification. That science tells us that what- 
ever has been said in one way can be said again in 
another, and that perhaps just such translation 
into other forms is the chief task of what we call 
thinking. And especially logic tells us that what- 
ever has been said in affinnative terms may often, 
to great advantage, be expressed in negative terms. 

If it is truly said that " John is in Boston," it 
is also safe to remark that " John is not in New 
147 



148 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 

York," and this latter statement may be of much 
greater importance to some of John's friends. 
There is, of course, a difficulty, namely that it is 
hard to exhaust the content of the negative judg- 
ment. When once you start on this process the 
trouble is not to find something to say but to tell 
where to stop in the illimitable expanse which lies 
before you. It is well enough to say that John is 
not in New York, but if you proceed to tell all 
the places in which John is not, considerable time 
must be allowed for the operation. While, there- 
fore, I insist that this logical principle be accepted 
in order that I may have a subject to talk about, 
I beg the audience not to be terrified by its pos- 
sibilities. For general purposes, logical principles 
must be applied sparingly and with discretion. It 
is quite possible to have too much of a good 
thing. 

But the one point on which I do insist is that in 
spite of all the wisdom of these ten wise men who 
have preceded me there is still something left to 
consider. They have told you what the college is. 
I may try to tell you what it is not. They have 
told you what the college has, what it does, what 
it has accomplished, what it dreams, what it will 
be in the days to come. Somewhere within the field 
of what it has not, what it does not do, what it has 
not done, what it does not dream, what it will not 
be — somewhere within this field, for which one 



THE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 140 

might claim infinite time, there lies the subject of 
this paper. 

If, then, we were with any fullness to define the 
function of the college in negative terms it would 
be necessary to show and to explain that the col- 
lege is not a high school, not a professional school, 
not a university, nor any part thereof. But every- 
one knows that there are many kinds of high 
school, many types of professional school, many 
separate schools within a university. If we should 
discuss each one of these " separatim et seriatim," 
showing that the college is not any one of them, is 
different from them all, I fear that the consequence 
for you would be much weariness of the flesh and 
great vexation of the spirit. But again the kindly 
science of logic will hurry to our rescue. That 
science has another valuable principle, viz., that 
there is no sense in denying a statement unless 
someone has asserted it. What assertions, then, 
of the identity of the college with other institu- 
tions are just now being made with sufficient in- 
sistence to demand our attention.'' There are 
teachers who seem to find little difference between 
the college and the high school, but their lack of 
perception is not very important. We are just 
emerging from a period in which the college has 
been regarded as a part of the university and has 
been identified with the whole in essential attitude 
and spirit. But the day of that confusion is 



150 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 

rapidly closing. The one confusion which does to- 
day threaten our understanding of the function of 
the college is that which identifies it with the pro- 
fessional school, wliich declares that there is no 
genuine education which is not really professional, 
which characterizes the belief in a " liberal educa- 
tion," separate from and independent of vocational 
and professional study, as an idle creation of dream 
and fancy. In these pragmatic days such a con- 
fusion as this is likely to spread far and wide. It 
is not the only instance of pragmatic thinking 
which just now threatens the clarity of our edu- 
cational policy, but it is an especially dangerous 
one because it strikes at the very roots of all our 
liberal teaching. Amid these days of celebration 
and study of the American liberal college, I should 
like to smite as hard as I can hit at this heresy 
which denies the very belief on which that college 
is built. 

The heresy is hard to meet just now because in 
a sense it catches us off our balance. Under the 
influence of the university ideal the colleges had 
been saying to their students, " Study anything 
you like ; all knowledge is good ; in fact, all knowl- 
edge is equally good ; make your choice, follow 
your bent ; if only you keep going in any direction 
a liberal education is assured." But as against 
this, we are seeing more and more clearly every 
day that the content of a liberal education is not 



THE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 151 

thus indefinite and indeterminate, that there is an 
intellectual culture which one must master if he is 
to travel the way of liberal education. And in our 
enthusiasm we have been crying: "Back to the 
good old college of earlier days, away with the 
extravagances of election and specialization, let us 
return again to the fathers, to the requirements 
which they established, to the college which they 
founded." And here it is that the subtle and dan- 
gerous heresy finds its opportunity. " Do you 
wish definite and coherent requirements.'' " it asks. 
" Very well, you will find them in the professional 
school." And if we protest that these are not the 
requirements that we had in mind, that they are not 
liberal but technical, then there descends upon us 
a crushing and bewildering argument. " You wish 
to return to the spirit and practice of the old 
colonial college," it says ; " very well, do so, but 
first recognize that the college which you imitate 
was itself a professional school. The colonial fore- 
fathers were not wasting idle dreams on this airy 
nothing which you call ' liberal training.' They 
needed ministers for their churches and so they 
founded colleges to train those ministers. The 
colleges which they established were in essential 
purpose schools of divinity, schools to train young 
men for the profession of the ministry. They 
were devised for a special purpose and the fore- 
fathers were shrewd enough to see to it that that 



152 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 

purpose was realized." And from this assertion 
as its premise, the argument proceeds to its con- 
clusion. 

" The old college was professional in spirit ; then 
so too should we be who imitate it in spirit. But 
the old college intended to train for only one of 
the professions. To that end all its courses of 
study, all its methods of teaching, were adapted. 
It will never do to give the same courses of study, 
the same teaching, to the boys who are planning 
for other professions. Loyalty to the old college 
demands that for each profession its own special 
system of preparation be devised; we in our day 
must do for lawyers, engineers, physicians, archi- 
tects, for each of these what the fathers in their 
day did for the students of divinity." So by the 
argument the college becomes simply a collection 
of professional schools ; liberal education as a thing 
apart has disappeared. And we arrive at a new 
definition of the American liberal college, — it is an 
institution which some people had mistakenly be- 
lieved to exist. 

In considering the effect of such an argument as 
this it is necessary to take into account the second- 
ary result as well as the primary. The first effect, 
as in the case of all honest conflicts with convincing 
arguments, is that you find yourself knocked down. 
The second stage of the experience, however, re- 
veals two facts: (1) that you can get up again, 



THE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 153 

and (2) that you are not hurt, indeed that you are 
rather exhilarated by what has happened. This 
secondary stage is proof positive that you have 
not been hit by anything solid. At this time, it 
is in order to inquire what it was which, at the 
moment of impact, gave such an impression of 
solidity. 

The most interesting feature of the argument is 
that the premise on which it depends is not true. 
The premise asserts that, in the sense in which we 
now use the term, the colonial college was a pro- 
fessional school. But it was not, nor was it in- 
tended to be. The supposed evidence for the asser- 
tion is simply a confusion as to the meaning of 
another statement which is true. There is no doubt 
that one of the primary motives of the founders 
of the early colleges was to provide for the educa- 
tion of the clergy. But the assertion under dis- 
cussion is not identical with this, nor does it follow 
from it. And apart from questions of inference, 
the plain facts of record concerning the purpose of 
the founders forbid the suggested interpretation of 
their intention. He who would hold to this inter- 
pretation must maintain two assertions concerning 
our colonial forefathers: (1) that they did not 
mean what they said, and (2) that they did not get 
what they paid for. My impression is that the 
antecedent probability is in both cases strongly 
against my opponent. 



154 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 

With regard to the purpose which the colleges 
were intended to further, there are clear expres- 
sions in the charters under which they were estab- 
lished. The assertion under discussion is that these 
colleges were established to give professional train- 
ing to ministerial students. The charter of Har- 
vard College, granted in 1650, defines the aim as 
" for the advancement of all good literature, arts, 
and sciences." The new articles of 1780, re- 
viewing the achievements of the college, say 
" in which University many persons of great 
eminence have, by the blessing of God, been 
initiated in those arts and sciences which qualified 
them for public employments both in Church 
and State.^^ 

The charter of Yale University, the Collegiate 
School of Connecticut, describes it as a school 
" wherein youth may be instructed in the arts and 
sciences, who through the blessing of Almighty 
God may be fitted for Public employment both in 
Church and Civil State." The charter of the 
Academy and Charitable School in the Province of 
Pennsylvania approves the project, " hoping that 
this academy may prove a nursery of wisdom and 
virtue, and that it will produce men of dispositions 
and capacities beneficial to mankind in the various 
occupations of life." The charter of Kings Col- 
lege in New York provides for the instruction and 
education of youth in the learned languages and in 



THE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 155 

the liberal arts and sciences. The announcement 
reads in part as follows : 

" A serious, virtuous, and industrious Course of Life 
being first provided for, it is further the Design of this 
College, to instruct and perfect the Youth in the 
Learned Languages, and in the Arts of Reasoning ex- 
actly, of Writing correctly and Speaking eloquently; 
And in the Arts of Numbering and Measuring, of Sur- 
veying and Navigation, of Geography and History, of 
Husbandry, Commerce, and Government; and in the 
Knowledge of all Nature in the Heavens above us, and 
in the Air, Water, and Earth around us, and the vari- 
ous Kinds of Meteors, Stones, Mines, and Minerals, 
Plants and Animals, and of every Thing useful for 
the Comfort, the Convenience, the Elegance of Life, 
in the chief Manufactures relating to any of these 
things; And finally, to lead them from the Study of 
Nature, to the Knowledge of themselves, and of the 
God of Nature, and their Duty to Him, themselves, 
and one another; and every Thing that can contribute 
to their true Happiness, both here and hereafter." 

Surely this is a strange course of study for a 
divinity school 1 

One of the most illuminating cases is that of 
Brown University. The expressed Intention of the 
founders of Brown University was " to establish a 
seminary of polite literature subject to the Gov- 
ernment of the Baptists," and beyond question they 



156 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 

were planning for the education of their own can- 
didates for the ministry. But does this mean that 
they planned to give professional theological train- 
ing in the college? If so, why is it specified that 
youth of all religious denominations shall be ac- 
cepted? Was it intended that Congregationalists 
and Episcopalians should become Baptist minis- 
ters? And why is it so definitely stated that " the 
Sectarian differences of opinions shall not make any 
Part of the Public and Classical Instruction "? Is 
it customary in a divinity school to forbid the dis- 
cussion of the tenets of the sect by which the school 
is established? There was no such restriction 
when the first divinity school was established at 
Andover in 1807, for then the project was de- 
layed until the founders could agree what creed 
should be taught, and until it had been voted that 
each professor should assent to the creed which the 
Hopkinsians had prepared. Is there not a different 
motive here from that expressed in the charter of 
Brown which says, " Into this Liberal and Catholic 
Institution shall never be admitted any Religious 
Tests but on the Contrary all the Members hereof 
shall for ever enjoy full free Absolute and unin- 
terrupted Liberty of Conscience"? In 1770 the 
trustees of the new college in Rhode Island voted 
" that the children of Jews may be admitted to the 
institution and intirely enjoy the freedom of their 



THE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 157 

own religion without any constraint or Imposition 
whatever." Was It In order that they might be 
prepared for the priesthood of their own church, or 
was It In the hope that the free and unhampered 
dialectic of their own Jewish faith might bring 
them eventually Into the Baptist pulpit? 

I have given only a few quotations from the 
charters and early statutes, but on these we may 
safely rest the case as to the purpose of the 
founders of the colonial colleges. Some people are 
saying to-day that the Intention was to give tech- 
nical training for the ministry. The charters say 
that the colleges were established to give teaching 
in literature, the arts, and sciences, with the ex- 
pectation that this teaching would be of value both 
in church and state, in all the various occupations 
into which young men might go. For my own 
part, the evidence of the charters is the more con- 
vincing. I am Inclined to think that the colonial 
forefathers knew what they meant and meant what 
they said. 

But now for the test of the work done. What- 
ever they said, did the colleges actually train men 
for the ministry In the sense In which professional 
schools are now preparing them for separate occu- 
pations? In his book on Educational Reform, 
President Eliot records that In the ten years from 
1761 to 1770 the percentage of ministers among 
the graduates of Harvard College was twenty-nine, 



168 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 

among those of Yale thirty-two, and among those 
of Princeton forty-five. In the first thirty-nine 
classes graduated from Brown only twenty-five per 
cent, of the members entered the ministry. Now 
what shall we say of the seventy-one per cent, at 
Harvard, the sixty-eight per cent, at Yale, the 
fifty-five per cent, at Princeton, and the seventy-five 
per cent, at Brown.'* These men were planning to 
practice law, medicine, teaching, business. Why did 
they go to a divinity school? Did they think that 
a man who is ready for the ministry is ready for 
anything.'' The statement is perhaps true, but 
hardly relevant. I venture to suggest that their 
real opinion was that expressed in the charters we 
have quoted, viz. : that the education which the col- 
lege gave was regarded as of value to a man what- 
ever the profession into which he might go. If it 
be urged that there were no other schools to which 
they could go, I should reply that in that case, if 
they had wanted something else, they would have 
made protest long and loud, and would have de- 
manded changes in the old colleges or the estab- 
lishment of new ones. But a record of the attitude 
of the lay graduates of our colleges is not one of 
fault-finding and protest. Rather have they shown 
unswerving loyalty and gratitude, and because of 
their faith in the college and its teaching, they 
have poured out the wealth which has enlarged the 
college to proportions of which its founders never 



THE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 159 

dreamed. Benefactors and graduates alike have 
believed in non-professional education, and have 
believed they were receiving it. He who says that 
they have paid for professional education says 
that they have paid for what they thought they 
were not getting. Knowing them as I do, I find the 
statement hard to accept. 

The point just made presents itself in another 
form when viewed in relation to present condi- 
tions. To the old college there went students plan- 
ning to enter all the professions, and they found 
there the education which they sought. Of what 
professional school is it true to-day that candidates 
for the other professions go to it for training? 
Are there many law students in the medical schools, 
many engineering students in the divinity schools, 
many architects in the schools of music? Would 
it not be a new type of engineering school which 
should attract forty-five, fifty-five, seventy, or 
seventy-five per cent, of students going into other 
professions ? I think that if we found an engineer- 
ing school of that type we should begin to give it 
ferent function from the one we had assigned it, 
another name, should recognize it as having a dif- 
should take away from it the name " professional " 
and call it " liberal," a school in which are to be 
found studies and teaching of value to a man what- 
ever his profession may be. To call such a school 
technical or professional is simply to twist terms 



160 ALEXANDER MEII(XEJOHN 

out of all resemblance to their ordinary meanings. 
It indicates a confusion of thought which demands 
more careful analysis of the argument than we have 
yet given. It will be worth while to examine it 
more closely. 

The argument as it stands is one of the most 
common types of fallacy. It says, " The colonial 
college prepared men for the ministry ; hence it did 
nothing else. It is the argument " a is b, hence 
a is only b," or again, it is, " if an object have 
a given quality, then it has no other quality." 
" Charles Darwin was an Englishman, hence of 
course he was not a biologist." " Spinoza was a 
grinder of lenses, hence he cannot have been a 
philosopher." But Darwin was a biologist in spite 
of the argument ; and Spinoza did dominate the 
thought of Europe, even while grinding lenses in 
his garret. The trouble with the argument is that 
the conclusion does not follow; there is no logical 
connection between conclusion and premise. A 
may be b and yet be also c and d and e as well. A 
college may be a good place for a young man who 
plans to enter the ministry and may yet have quali- 
ties and purposes of which that statement is in 
no sense an adequate description. It may well be 
that its value for ministerial students is only one 
phase of its total and fundamental function. That 
this is true is already apparent from its appeal to 
students of other professions. If we can now de- 



[xUB FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 161 

fine this total appeal, the confusion should dis- 
appear and the modicum of truth which the argu- 
ment contains should separate itself out from the 
vast error in which that truth has been involved. 

The real motive of the founders of the early col- 
leges, so far as it concerned students for the min- 
istry, appears in the account given by Walter 
Cochrane Bronson in his History of Brown Uni- 
versity. The Baptists, he tells us, were eager to 
have a college under their own control, to which 
their ministerial students might go. But why,'* 
Was it because they were not sufficiently supplied 
with ministers, or that the candidates were unable 
to secure the technical training needed for their 
profession? Not at all. The reason, he tells us, 
was that at the time Brown was established " there 
were only two Baptist ministers in all New Eng- 
land who had what is called a liberal education; 
and they were not clear in the doctrines of grace." 
Now in accordance with the custom of the time, 
the leaders of the denomination could easily pro- 
vide for the professional training of their boys by 
placing them in the charge of older men who 
regularly gave such instruction to their appren- 
tices. But they recognized that the denomination 
could not hold its own, could not achieve its pur- 
pose in the community unless its ministers were 
men of power and intelligence, men who could lead 
and dominate the men about them. And so the 



163 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 

Baptist Church provided for the education of its 
young men who were candidates for the ministry. 
Did it provide for their technical theological in- 
struction? The charter of the college specifically 
denies this. The purpose was to educate minis- 
ters, — but in what sense? Our opponents have 
interpreted the purpose as that of educating men 
to be ministers. The real purpose was that of 
educating ministers to be men. And at the same 
time by the same methods they were educating 
lawyers to be men, and teachers, physicians, and 
business men to be men. The same argument which 
proves the old college to have been a divinity school 
would prove it to be a law school, a medical school, 
a school of pedagogy, a business school. But the 
argument proves too much. There is a limit to the 
number of different things a single thing can be. 
The old college did educate ministers just as it 
educated candidates for other professions, but it 
did not give to each of these groups a different 
education. It was dealing with something common 
to them all, and so it gave to them all the same 
instruction, — the culture of a liberal education. 

I think it is clear that the issue we are discuss- 
ing rests upon the interpretation of a phrase — 
" founded for the education of ministers." There 
is no doubt that the phrase expresses in large meas- 
ure the purpose of the early colleges. But what 
does it mean ? It is amazing to see how, in the face 



THE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 163 

of definite records to the contrary, this statement 
has been taken to mean that the colleges were 
schools of divinity. But the phrase admits of an- 
other interpretation which has the advantage of 
agreeing with the records. What does it mean to 
teach a minister? Does it mean only to teach him 
to be a minister? He has many other things to 
learn besides that. He is taught by his wife, 
taught by his children, by his friends, and by his 
enemies. But the caddie who teaches him to play 
golf does not thereby become a member of a faculty 
of divinity ; he may even not be a professor of re- 
ligion. A school for the deaf does not necessarily 
teach deafness, nor does a school for foreigners 
usually teach them to be foreign. A school for 
anybody may undertake to teach him what he needs 
to know. Our colonial forefathers were persuaded 
that ministers as well as other men need knowl- 
edge of things outside their profession, need knowl- 
edge of the arts and sciences, and it was that belief 
which found expression in the colleges which they 
established. 

The argument which we have been attacking has 
told us to follow the example of the colonial col- 
lege. If I understand at all the purpose of the 
modern liberal college that is just what it is doing. 
There is a vast difference in intellectual content as 
between the old college and the new, but the two 
institutions are at one in the belief in the value 



164 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 

of knowledge as the guide of human life, and in 
the conviction that certain elements of knowledge 
are of common value to all men whatever their 
differences of occupation or trade. 

I should like to have the privilege of attempting 
one last restatement of this conviction in positive 
terms before this paper is closed. 

In the old colonial community, the clergyman, 
as in lesser degree the lawyer and the teacher, was 
the man of ideas. He was no mere teacher of the 
gospel and tender of the parish. While his people 
lived their lives it was his task to reflect upon their 
living, to formulate the beliefs on which it was 
based, to study the conditions by which it was 
molded, to bring to clearness the problems by 
which it was faced, to study the moral, social, 
economic, political situations of which it was con- 
stituted. It was his part and the part of men of 
like intellectual development to attempt to under- 
stand the lives which other men were living with 
lesser degrees of understanding. It was his task 
to serve as prophet and seer, as guide and coun- 
selor of his people. 

It was for this task that the liberal college in- 
tended to prepare him. And in these latter days, 
as the scope of education has been extended more 
and more broadly, the same liberal education has 
been given to great numbers of our young men, 
whatever the professions they are planning to 



THE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 165 

enter. At the present time a very small percent- 
age of our college graduates become ministers ; 
more than half of them enter into some form of 
business occupation. But whether they are to be 
in business or in the ministry, the same education 
must be given them, since the new community has 
the same need as had the old of understanding 
itself, of stating itself in terms of ideas. 

This fundamental belief of liberal education can 
be stated in terms of two principles. The first is 
shared by both liberal and technical teaching. The 
second applies to liberal education alone. The 
principles are these: (1) that activity guided by 
ideas is on the whole more successful than the same 
activity without the control of ideas, and (2) that 
in the activities common to all men the guidance by 
ideas is quite as essential as in the case of those 
which different groups of men carry on in differen- 
tiation from one another. 

The first principle applies to all higher educa- 
tion. We recognize that human deeds may be done 
in either of two ways, — first, by habit, by custom, 
by tradition, by rule of thumb, just as they always 
have been done; or, on the other hand, under the 
guidance of study, of investigation, of ideas and 
principles by wliich men attempt to discover and 
to formulate knowledge as to how these activities 
can best be done. Now all higher education, liberal 
or professional, rests on the belief that on the 



166 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 

whole an activity which is understood will be more 
successful than one which is not understood. 
Knowledge pays ; intelligence is power. 

The liberal school and the professional are, how- 
ever, separated by their choice of the activities 
which each shaU study. Every professional school 
selects some one special group of activities carried 
on by the members of one special trade or occupa- 
tion and brings to the furtherance of these the 
full light of intellectual understanding and guid- 
ance. The liberal school, on the other hand, takes 
as its content those activities which all men carry 
on, those deeds which a man must do in virtue of 
the fact that he is a man ; and within this field it 
seeks to achieve the same enlightenment and in- 
sight. The Hberal college would learn and teach 
what can be known about a man's moral experience, 
our common speech, our social relations, our politi- 
cal institutions, our religious aspirations and be- 
liefs, the world of nature which surrounds and 
molds us, our intellectual and esthetic strivings 
and yearnings — all these, the human things that 
all men share, the liberal school attempts to 
understand, believing that if they are understood, 
men can live them better than they would live 
them by mere tradition and blind custom. But 
one of the terrible things about our generation 
is that the principle which it accepts so eagerly 
in the field of the vocations it refuses and 



THE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 167 

shuns in the deeper things of human living. I 
have known fathers, planning for the training of 
a son, who would see to it that in the preparation 
for his trade every bit of knowledge he can have is 
supplied him. If the boy is to be a dyer of cloth, 
then he must study the sciences that understand 
that process. All that can be known about the na- 
ture of fabrics, the constitution of dyestuffs, the 
processes of application and development of the 
dye — not one bit of all this may be lacking from 
the teaching of the boy. To put him into the shop 
without that knowledge, to let him learn by imita- 
tion, pick up the rule of thumb, follow the ways of 
master workmen of the trade — to do that would be 
to make him only a workman, one who can do what 
has been done, can do what he is told to do. But 
the father is not content with this. His boy must 
understand and know the trade so that he may be 
the leader and the guide, may give the orders rather 
than obey them. But how often the same father is 
unwilling that his boy attempt to understand his 
own religion, his own morals, his own society, his 
own politics ! In these fields, surely the father's 
opinions are good enough! Keep the boy's mind 
at rest regarding his religion and his economics ; 
what has been believed before had better still be 
believed! It may be bad for business, may inter- 
fere with a boy's success if he becomes too much 
interested in the fundamental things of life I And 



168 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 

so such parents invite us to leave the universal 
things, the things most sacred and significant, to 
blindness, to the mere drift of custom, to tradi- 
tion, and rule of thumb. And here it is that the 
liberal college again asserts its loyalty to the men 
who founded the older institutions. Those men 
had intellectual faith ; they believed that it is worth 
while to know the life of man, and so they studied 
it and taught it to their pupils. I know that I 
speak for the teachers and the administrators of 
the liberal college here represented to-day when I 
pledge anew our loyalty to the men in whose foot- 
steps we follow. So far as we can bring it about 
the young people of our generation shall know 
themselves, shall know their fellows, shall think 
their way into the common life of their people, 
and by their thought shall illumine and direct it. 
If we are not pledged to that, then we have deserted 
the old standard ; we are apostates from the faith. 
But I think that a good many of us are still loyal. 
We welcome every new extension of vocational in- 
struction. We know that every man should have 
some special task to do and should be trained to do 
that task as well as it can possibly be done. The 
more the special trades and occupations are guided 
and directed by skill and knowledge the more will 
human life succeed in doing the things it plans to 
do. But by the same principle we pledge our- 
selves to the study of the universal things in human 



THE FUNCTION OF THE COLLEGE 169 

life, the things that make us men as well as min- 
isters and tradesmen. We pledge ourselves for- 
ever to the study of human living in order that 
living may be better done. We have not yet for- 
gotten that fundamentally the proper study of 
mankind is Man. 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE IN THE 

LIFE OF THE AMERICAN 

PEOPLE 

COMMISSIONER PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 

From the beginning we of the United States 
have believed in the education of the college no 
less than in that of the elementary school. North 
and South and in the ever-expanding West as 
our frontier has moved across the continent, we 
have felt the need of men and women with the 
education of the college for social, industrial, 
civic, and religious leadership. The consciousness 
of this need has become clearer as industries have 
become more numerous and extensive, church more 
free, religion more comprehensive, and society and 
state more democratic. Scientific discovery, labor- 
saving invention, commercial expansion, facility of 
travel and intercourse, literary activity and the 
growth of the spirit of criticism have brought 
a clearer recognition of the value of all education. 
Increase in wealth, most rapid in the last half 
century, has made it possible for us to establish 
and maintain schools in some degree at least in 
proportion to our recognition of their value. 
171 



m PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 

True to our Anglo-Saxon ideals, we have in our 
efforts to supply our need for schools welcomed 
the assistance, alike, of individuals, churches, 
benevolent societies, and of the Federal Govern- 
ment, States, and smaller political units. All 
these agencies have worked in generous rivalry 
and with hearty good will towards one common aim. 
Public and private schools, of whatever grade, 
have all been schools of and for the people. They 
have differed chiefly in their means of support. In 
a very real sense all our schools have been and are 
public schools. In reality we have no private 
schools. Whatever the source of their income and 
the form of their control, all our schools have been 
and are, in all things essential, governed by public 
opinion and popular sentiment, the great control- 
ling forces in all democracies. Their only purpose 
and function have been and are to serve the public 
by preparing children and youth for life, for wise 
and noble living, for intelligent useful work, for 
the duties and responsibilities of citizenship, and 
in so far as may be, for eternal destiny. It is 
the glory of our schools that they exclude none 
because of social rank, religious creed, partisan 
political affiliations, economic conditions, or race. 
Private schools, even the most select, seldom ex- 
clude any who will conform to their standards of 
conduct. Church schools welcome youth of all 
creeds and of none. For the poor there are free 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 173 

tuition, scholarships paying all or part of their 
expenses for living, loan funds on the most liberal 
terms, and opportunities to pay their way by labor 
of many kinds. Fortunately all kinds of useful 
labor done with worthy purpose are regarded as 
honorable. Social recognition and highest honors 
frequently go to those who pay their way even by 
menial service. Even in those States in which 
white and colored children must attend separate 
schools, there are schools for all, and the tendency 
grows stronger from year to year to make the 
schools for the children and grandchildren of 
former slaves as nearly as possible equal in effi- 
ciency to the schools maintained for the children 
and grandchildren of the former masters. Demo- 
cratic, or striving to be democratic, in all else, 
we are striving to be democratic in education also ; 
and our democracy grows broader and stronger 
and finer and richer and more tolerant and more 
all-pervasive as the years go by. 

Is it too much to claim for the American college 
that it has been the chief force in our American 
life making for industrial efficiency, economic de- 
velopment, sane and safe democracy, social purity 
and refinement, religious freedom, spiritual culture, 
and higher idealism? In the upward striving and 
onward march of the American people from the 
time when a few thousands, mostly sons and daugh- 
ters of the poor, landed on the shores of Virginia 



174 PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 

and New England till now, when after three short 
centuries they fill the space between the double 
oceans, a hundred million strong, peoples from all 
the ends of the earth, of all creeds, tongues, and 
races, living in peace in half a hundred self-govern- 
ing States, united in one great democratic republic, 
the freest, strongest, and wealthiest, and most pro- 
gressive nation the world has ever known, the col- 
leges have played their part faithfully and well. 
Without them and their influence the story of our 
life would have been quite different in most par- 
ticulars. How different, it is impossible to imag- 
ine. Read the story of religious leadership in the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Call the roll 
of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, 
of the Continental Congress, and of the Constitu- 
tional Convention. Visit the halls of the College 
of William and Mary, Princeton, Columbia, Yale, 
and Harvard, and note how many of the leaders 
in the great events connected with the birth of the 
nation are claimed as their sons. 

Through Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, 
Madison, Monroe, the Adamses, Webster, Calhoun, 
Benton; Cooper, Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, 
Hawthorne, Bancroft, Motley, Taylor, Emerson, 
Lanier; Gray, Dana, Leconte; Parker, Dwight, 
Beecher ; Whitney, Morse, and hundreds of others 
of their day and later whose names are known to 
all, the colleges have made direct contributions of 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 175 

incalculable value to all phases of American life. 
But the contributions made through the lives of 
hundreds of thousands of their students less well 
known, and by their indirect influence on the lives 
of millions of earnest men and women who never 
entered their halls, have been greater still. Great- 
est of all has been the influence of the spirit of 
freedom and democracy, idealism and service, and 
devotion to truth which has pervaded them all and 
inspired the communities to which they have min- 
istered. In plain living and high thinking the 
colleges and college men and women have led the 
way. 

Not two decades had gone by since the first 
landing of the pilgrims in New England, and 
the colony was still small and weak, and, but for 
the sterling character, strong faith, and fixed pur- 
pose of the colonists, still uncertain as to its fu- 
ture, when the school was founded which later 
became Harvard College and Harvard University. 
For many decades Harvard was a typical small 
college, with cheap buildings, little equipment, 
meager income, small faculty, and few students. It 
was rich only in the love and devotion of its friends, 
its idealism, and its purposes. But the Harvard 
of the seventeenth century, even its poverty, served 
the pioneer people of this Eastern coast and met 
their demands as hundreds of small and strug- 
gling pioneer colleges, some of them struggling 



176 PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 

unto death, served fresh water and backwoods 
communities through two centuries of pioneer life. 

The population of Virginia was still small, 
though its territory was large and indefinite 
enough, when Their Majesties' Royal College of 
WilHam and Mary was founded in 1693, to become 
in the next century the training ground of democ- 
racy, the inspiration of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, and the inalienable rights of man. Only 
these two. Harvard and WilHam and Mary, sur- 
vive from the seventeenth century. From the first 
quarter of the eighteenth century we have Yale 
and Washington College, in Maryland. From the 
second quarter we have the University of Penn- 
sylvania, the Moravian Seminary and College for 
Women in Pennsylvania, Princeton, originating 
in the " Log College," and Washington and Lee, 
known in those days as Liberty Hall. From the 
third quarter we have Columbia (Kings College), 
Brown, Rutgers, and Dartmouth. These twelve 
antedate the beginning of the Revolution. 

From the last quarter of the century we have 
Hampden-Sidney, Washington and Jefferson, 
Dickinson, University of Pittsburgh, Georgetown, 
St. John's College, The College of Charleston, 
Williams, Tusculum, Blount (now the University 
of Tennessee), Washington (the last three founded 
in the same year and all in the valley of East 
Tennessee), Union, University of North Carolina, 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 177 

Transylvania, Marietta, University of Vermont, 
and Middlebury. A total of seventeen survive 
from these twenty-five years of revolution and the 
inauguration of our government. This fact alone, 
that during these twenty-five years of stirring 
events our fathers established almost a score of 
colleges that have lived and grown until now, is 
sufficient evidence of their belief in the value of the 
college in a democracy of the kind they were try- 
ing to build. At the beginning of the nineteenth 
century there were twenty-nine schools which are 
still counted among our colleges and universities, 
and there were probably as many others which 
no longer exist. Not a bad showing for a strug- 
gling group of pioneer rural States with a total 
population of little more than five millions. It is 
significant that five of the twenty-five were west 
of the Alleghanies. Of the twenty-seven which 
date from the eighteenth century three are now 
State universities. 

Continuing our count, from the first quarter of 
the nineteenth century we again have twenty-nine, 
ten of which are west of the Alleghanies. Among 
them is Allegheny College, fortieth in the list. 
Five of the tvrenty-nine are now State schools. 
From the second quarter of this century we have 
113, of which nine are State or National schools, 
and from the next decade ninety-one, of which five 
are State schools. Of the 567 colleges and univer- 



178 PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 

sities reporting to the Bureau of Education in 
1914, 262 had their beginning before the war be- 
tween the States. The decade of the war and re- 
construction gives us eighty-two, of which fifteen 
are State or Nationah The large increase in the 
number of State schools in this and the following 
decade is due in large measure to the passage of 
the First Morrill Act in 1862, appropriating pub- 
lic lands for the use of Colleges of Agriculture 
and Mechanic Arts. This Act gave impetus to 
the growing sentiment for public education and 
schools of all grades free to all and supported by 
public taxation. From the next three decades we 
have eighty-two, sixty-seven, and eighty-six, re- 
spectively, and from the last decade of the nine- 
teenth century fifty-six, a total of 291 for the 
four decades, fifty of them State, National, munic- 
ipal, or distinctly technical. From the first 
decade of the twentieth century we have only 
twenty-seven new institutions, of which six are 
State or technical, and from the next four years 
only four, of which one is a university with no 
college department yet organized. 

These are the numbers of those which survive. 
Some have died, some have been united with other 
schools, some have given up the struggle to main- 
tain themselves as colleges and have taken names 
which indicate more accurately the work they do. 
There are still some that call themselves colleges 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 179 

or universities but are not listed as such by the 
Bureau of Education. 

That we have had and still have more colleges 
than we need, that many have been founded un- 
wisely, that many have, because of lack of means, 
been unable to do the work they honestly tried to 
do, that many have functioned chiefly in boom- 
ing real estate — all may be conceded. But what 
does it matter.? This kind of extravagance is 
probably inseparable from a young and exuberant 
democracy such as ours has been. All have served 
a good purpose. Even the fake institutions have 
served to develop the critical spirit, and their 
power to deceive is a tribute to the faith which 
the people have in the college and the things for 
which it stands. 

In the Report of the Commissioner of Educa- 
tion for 1892, 600 colleges are listed; in the 
Report for 1895, 694; for 1900, 677; for 1905, 
633 ; for 1910, 618 ; for 1914, 567, an average now 
of one college for 175,000 of total population. 
The number of colleges will probably continue to 
grow less for many years. A word later about 
the reasons for this. 

Of the 567 colleges listed in the Report of the 
Commissioner of Education for 1914, ninety-five 
are under National, State, or municipal control; 
thirty-two are under denominational control, and 
144 are non-sectarian. Ninety-two are colleges 



180 PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 

for women, 145 are colleges for men, and 330 are 
co-educational. 

So much for the colleges of the past and the 
present. It would be a pleasant task to dwell on 
the various phases of their work and of their 
benign influence on American life. But their past 
is safe, and I am just now more interested in their 
future. What changes are necessary to enable our 
colleges to adjust themselves to the new conditions 
and demands which have arisen, to use their means 
and energies more economically, and to render full- 
est and best service in the larger and more com- 
plex life upon which we have entered? 

First. I suggest that the colleges which have 
preparatory departments should begin at once to 
prepare to abandon them or to organize them as 
separate schools, with their own teachers and de- 
pendent upon their own resources. 

There was a time when there was need for the 
preparatory school or department at all or most 
colleges. Schools in which boys and girls could 
be prepared for admission to any college with 
respectable standards were few. The public high 
schools of four years based on eight years of ele- 
mentary schooling are of recent date. There was 
a large gap between the work of the public schools 
in most communities and the work of the fresh- 
man class in any good college. Private prepara- 
tory schools were costly and many were inefficient 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 181 

and unsatisfactory. But these conditions have 
changed rapidly in the last fifteen years. There 
are now in the United States nearly fourteen thou- 
sand public and private high schools, fully ten 
thousand of which have courses of full four years. 
These are found in cities, towns, and rural com- 
munities alike. In the ten thousand four-year 
high schools are enrolled more than a million stu- 
dents. Many of these high schools are better 
equipped with buildings, laboratories, and teach- 
ers than most of our colleges were a generation 
ago. Practically all are capable of giving the 
preparation required for admission at most col- 
leges. If some of the public high schools fail to 
give the desired amount of Latin or Greek, they 
give more of other subjects; and most of the pri- 
vate high schools, of which there are more than 
two thousand, are able to give full preparation in 
these languages. For many reasons the public and 
private high schools are better and more desirable 
than the preparatory schools of the colleges. 

Still 354< church and non-sectarian colleges re- 
port preparatory departments with approximately 
forty-three thousand preparatory students. The 
same colleges enroll less than sixty thousand regu- 
lar college students. The total number of their 
preparatory students is more than two-thirds the 
number of their regular college students. In 
many colleges the number of preparatory students 



18^ PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 

is two, three, four, or five times the number of 
college students. Why should these colleges con- 
tinue to divide their means and energies and bring 
more or less confusion into their work that they 
may add 354 high schools to the fourteen thou- 
sand which we already have, more than ten thou- 
sand with courses of four years, and give to forty- 
three thousand boys and girls instruction little dif- 
ferent from that received by a million and a quar- 
ter other boys and girls in the high schools? 

These colleges are as a rule not among the 
stronger and richer. Most of them have much 
less income and equipment than they need for 
their legitimate college work. Many of them have 
lower standards of admission than are justified by 
the work now done by the better public and private 
high schools. Some of them admit students to their 
freshman classes with much less preparation than 
can be had in the high schools. Of the ninety-two 
colleges for women, sixty-eight maintain prepara- 
tory departments. These report 6,873 prepar- 
atory and 8,045 regular college students. Prac- 
tically all these colleges have very meager incomes. 
Why should they stint their college work that they 
may add sixty-eight tomorethan ten thousand high 
schools open to girls and able to prepare them for 
admission to the freshman class of any of these col- 
leges ? The eight thousand students in their prepar- 
atory classes is inconsiderable in comparison with 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 183 

the seven hundred thousand girls in the public 
and private high schools. And it should be remem- 
bered that many, probably most of the students in 
the preparatory classes of colleges of all kinds, 
never enter the college proper. To the extent that 
this is true they are not in reality preparatory 
schools, but only abnormal high schools for general 
education. 

Nor are most or all these colleges with prepara- 
tory departments found in the States which have 
fewest good high schools. Iowa reports 592 public 
high schools with 45,877 students and 85 private 
high schools with 3,614 students, yet 21 Iowa 
colleges report preparatory departments with a 
total of 1,820 students. The same colleges report 
less than twice this number of regular college stu- 
dents, and all need larger incomes and better 
equipment for their legitimate college work. 
Pennsylvania reports 886 public high schools with 
enrollment of 84,453 students, and 138 pri- 
vate high schools with 12,935 students. But 22 
Pennsylvania colleges maintain preparatory de- 
partments for 2,601 students. Ohio reports 811 
public high schools with 77,324 students, and 75 
private high schools with 4,336 students, yet 28 
Ohio colleges support preparatory departments 
for 3,039 high-school students. New York reports 
666 public high schools with 133,736 students, and 
237 private high schools with 17,081 students, yet 



184 PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 

11 New York colleges give some kind of high- 
school education to 3,393 boys and girls in their 
preparatory departments. Eleven Indiana col- 
leges, 27 Illinois colleges, 26 Missouri colleges have 
preparatory departments. There seems to be no 
longer any good reason for this policy, however 
necessary it may have been formerly. 

Second. All colleges which now require for ad- 
mission less than the preparation that can be had 
in four years of good high-school work should 
raise their standards to this point at once or as 
early as the majority of the communities served by 
them can be brought to maintain good high schools 
with courses of four years. There is now little 
reason, and there should soon be none, why any 
institution calling itself a college should do high- 
school work or admit students who have not had 
four years of work in a good high school or its 
equivalent. Within the last ten years and espe- 
cially within the last five years there has been 
a very general movement for higher standards. 
Half the colleges of the country or more have 
within these years raised their standards of admis- 
sion, on paper at least, by an amount represented 
by one, two, or three years of high-school work. 
But not all of these have raised their standards of 
graduation by an equal amount, and bachelor de- 
grees still have a very uncertain and indefinite 
meaning. There is need of some general agree- 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 185 

ment as to the terms on which these degrees shall be 
given and as to what they shall mean. 

Third. Colleges requiring or accepting for ad- 
mission units in any subject should build their 
work in that subject on the work accepted for ad- 
mission, and not on a smaller amount. The total 
amount of work in any subject should be the sum of 
the work accepted for admission plus the full num- 
ber of years of college work. Units of prepara- 
tion should not be counted both for admission and 
for graduation. As nearly as possible college work 
should be in the line of the preparatory work and 
in substantial groups, so that the colleges may be 
relieved of the necessity of doing through a series 
of groups a large amount of more or less discon- 
nected high-school work. 

Fourth. Two hundred or more of the smaller 
colleges should, I believe, become junior colleges, 
attempting to do only two or three years of col- 
lege work, preferably only two years. These 
junior colleges should require for admission the 
same degree of preparation as is required by the 
standard four-year colleges and should not attempt 
to maintain preparatory departments. They 
should, on the other hand, concentrate all their 
energies, means, and equipment of buildings, 
laboratories, libraries, and teaching force on doing 
well and in a large and strong way the work of 
the first two college years. For the work of in- 



186 PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 

struction they should employ men and women of 
the best native ability, good scholarship, and the 
highest skill in teaching. The instructors should 
have a comprehensive grasp of the principles of 
education, its aims and ends and its relations to 
life. They should be whole-souled men and women 
with sympathy for boys and girls at this most 
critical period of their life, with high ideals and 
power to inspire them to the best. Here more 
than elsewhere are needed teachers answering to 
Daniel Coit Gilman's description, " tall men, broad- 
shouldered men, sun-crowned men," or women like 
unto them. In these years the personality of the 
teacher probably counts for more than at any other 
time, as did the kind of personal contact which 
students had with the principal members of the 
faculties of the old-time colleges, but which they 
no longer can have in the larger colleges of to-day, 
nor with men of the highest ability in most of the 
smaller colleges as they are now organized. Ideals, 
inspiration, desires, and enthusiasms may count 
for more here than technical knowledge of sub- 
jects, however accurate and thorough. For two 
years of college work these schools with compara- 
tively small incomes might hope to pay a few 
teachers of the kind I have tried to describe suf- 
ficient salaries to hold them for this most impor- 
tant work, and to equip laboratories and libraries 
adequately, so that a minimum of the time of the 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 187 

students would be lost. The importance of this 
will be better understood if it is remembered that 
more than sixty out of every hundred who enter 
college leave at or before the end of the second 
year, never to return. What college does for 
them must be done in these two years, for many of 
them in one year only. 

After finishing the two years of the junior col- 
lege, students should, of course, be advised to go for 
the last two years of college work to the larger and 
richer colleges which are able to equip their labora- 
tories and libraries and to employ large numbers 
of specialists for the more technical work of these 
3^ears, Can there be any doubt that under these 
conditions many more would enter and remain 
through these advanced classes than now do or that 
the sum total of results of the four years in col- 
lege would be much larger than it now is for most 
students? For most students the two years of 
junior college work might be made almost the full 
equivalent of what is done now in three and the 
better preparation and the stronger impulse gained 
would insure better results in the last two years 
also. 

Of course this better type of work in the smaller 
junior colleges would soon compel the larger col- 
leges to make like provision for their first and 
second year students, who are now too often 
crowded into over-large classes or sections and 



188 PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 

given into the hands of young and inexperienced 
teachers quite different from the ideal set forth 
above and seldom come in contact with the larger 
and more experienced men and women who make the 
reputation of the colleges. Some of these younger 
and more inexperienced teachers do prove to be men 
and women of the best type and make good when 
they have had more experience, but many only 
prove themselves to be unfit. 

That you may understand still better the need 
for this reorganization of our colleges, let me 
call your attention to the following significant 
facts : 

In 1892 the 600 colleges reporting to the Bu- 
reau of Education had property and endowment 
amounting to $200,541,375, a working income of 
$17,034,614, 11,432 professors and instructors, 
122,403 students. In 1914 the 567 reporting had 
property and endowments amounting to $849,296,- 
071, a working income of $102,156,401, 31,312 
professors and other instructors, and 334,978 stu- 
dents. The increase in twenty-two years was more 
than three hundred per cent, in property and en- 
dowment, five hundred per cent, in working income, 
nearly two hundred per cent, in instructors and 
in students. The figures for property and endow- 
ment and for working income are most remarkable. 
But most of the increase in property and in income 
as well as in instructors and students has been in 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 189 

a small per cent, of the Institutions and the differ- 
ences In wealth and size are now much greater 
than they were twenty-two years ago. 

In 1914, 29 colleges do not report their Incomes, 
and 45 report Incomes less than ten thousand 
dollars ; 92 report working Incomes between ten 
and twenty thousand dollars, and 80 between 
twenty and thirty thousand dollars. Including 
in the count those not reporting incomes, as all 
except two or three should be, we have 246 col- 
leges with working incomes less than thirty thou- 
sand dollars. Forty-six having working Incomes 
between thirty and forty thousand dollars and 46 
between forty and fifty thousand dollars. There 
were in 1914, therefore, 328 colleges having work- 
ing incomes less than fifty thousand dollars. Sixty 
per cent, of the colleges and universities had six 
per cent, of the total of annual working Incomes, 
ten per cent, of the total property and endowment, 
and twelve per cent, of the college students ; forty 
per cent, had ninety-four per cent, of the total of 
working incomes, and eighty-eight per cent, of 
the students. Twenty-six Institutions, each having 
$600,000 or more working Income, had thirty-six 
per cent, of the total of working incomes, and 
eighteen per cent, of the students. Again, ninety- 
three of the colleges having working Incomes less 
than fifty thousand dollars had less than fifty regu- 
lar college students each and ninety-nine had more 



190 PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 

than fifty but not more than one hundred such stu- 
dents, a total of 192 colleges with not more than 
one hundred regular college students. 

In the average college with 50 students 35 
will be in the first two years and 15 in the 
last two. In a college of 100 students, 70 will be 
in the first two and 30 in the last two years. The 
expense for teaching the 15 and the 30 will 
be more than the expense for teaching the 35 
and the 70. If the two higher classes were sent 
away to the larger and richer colleges, the number 
of students in the lower classes might be more than 
doubled and the total attendance increased more 
than fifty per cent, without additional cost for 
teaching and equipment, and all students, those 
remaining and those sent away, would be better 
taught. But the better teaching in the lower 
classes and the larger number of students attracted 
to and held in these classes thereby would result 
in more general support, larger endowments, and 
more adequate incomes for the colleges. 

In most instances these junior colleges should 
be affiliated more or less closely with one or more 
stronger colleges to which they would send most 
of their students. Many students from the same 
junior college would thus find themselves in 
the higher classes of the same institution, and 
would rejoice in keeping up in the larger institu- 
tion the spirit of the college from which they came 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 191 

and in which they received their ideals and inspira- 
tions. They would think of themselves, both while 
in the senior college and in after life, as of the 
college in which they spent the earlier years of 
their college life. Thus the junior college need 
not fear losing its place in the affections of its 
students. 

I have dwelt on this matter of the junior college 
because it seems to me to be a matter of very 
great importance and because I know how difficult 
it is going to be to bring many institutions that 
should transform themselves into junior colleges 
to break away from the traditional four years. 
Yet a beginning has already been made and there 
are now a score or more junior colleges in the 
country. Unfortunately most of them still do two 
or more years of high-school work. This work, 
I feel sure, they will abandon soon. On the 
other hand, some of the city high schools are 
adding two years of college work and calling them- 
selves junior colleges. There are a dozen such in 
California. 

Fifth. Fifty or seventy-five colleges with in- 
comes between fifty and one hundred thousand dol- 
lars should follow the example of Allegheny and 
Amherst and limit themselves to one, two, or three 
Well-organized groups of subjects, doing four 
years of earnest work in these, and striving to 
attain in them a higher degree of excellence than 



19a PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 

is possible with the larger and more diversified 
curricula of most modern colleges. If this were 
done students would then be able to select the col- 
lege in which the best opportunities might be had 
in the subjects and group of subjects in which 
they were most interested. Classes in the general 
subjects would thus come to be made up of select 
students. Abler instructors would be attracted by 
the opportunity of doing better work than can be 
done with classes in which many of the students 
have no interest in or ability for the subject. A 
finer and better spirit would pervade the entire 
school and the results obtained would be more 
satisfactory in every way. Fortunately this 
is no longer a matter of mere theory or sur- 
mise. The two colleges already referred to and 
some others have already demonstrated its practi- 
cabihty. 

When the readjustments here set forth have 
been made, as I believe they will be made in the 
next few years; when we have reorganized our 
twelve years of elementary and secondary school- 
ing on a basis of six years of elementary and six 
years of high school, as we are now beginning to 
do ; when we learn to promote teachers with their 
classes in the elementary school so as to preserve 
the continuity of teaching from year to year, as 
we do not do now, and when we have learned to 
demand a little better preparation on the part of 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 193 

all teachers both in the elementary school and in 
the high school, we shall, I feel sure, be able to 
send boys and girls to college with the equivalent 
of two years in advancement over that which they 
now have and with much greater power of initia- 
tive and independent thinking, and to gain the 
equivalent of another year in the four years of col- 
lege work. This, with the fuller development of a 
few of our graduate schools made possible by their 
large and rapidly increasing incomes, and with the 
raising of standards in our professional and tech- 
nical schools, now well under way, will enable us 
not only to give better preparation to the young 
men and women upon whom must rest the duties 
and responsibilities of leadership in our own coun- 
try ; it will also enable us to rise to the opportunity 
offered us and the responsibility thrust upon us 
by what is now taking place in Europe, and to 
assume world leadership in education. Attract- 
ing to our schools thousands of young men 
and women from all countries of the world, we 
shall be able to inspire them with the spirit of our 
democracy and to teach them a higher philosophy 
than they have been able to learn from the mili- 
tary despotisms, aristocracies, and feudalisms of 
the Old World. 

Our own democratic republic with its two hun- 
dred millions of people and its thousand billions 
of wealth within the next fifty years, with its 



194i PHILANDER P. CLAXTON 

larger and more complex industrial and political 
problems and its finer and richer culture, and a 
world civilization to be rebuilt on broader and safer 
foundation, call us to the task and hearten us for 
its accomplishment. 



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